


Voyeur

by scriibblehere



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Eventual James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Eventual Smut, F/M, First War with Voldemort, Hogwarts Seventh Year, Love, Marauders, Pre-War, Romance, Sex, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:55:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 66,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25880032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scriibblehere/pseuds/scriibblehere
Summary: Winner of JilyAwards 2020 Fav Smut/NSFWAs his seventh year begins and the First Wizarding World grows outside Hogwarts’ castle walls, James Potter has one goal in mind: to finally win over Lily Evans. The only problem? Accidentally seeing her with someone else, of course—but it’s not like that will stop him. [L/OC to L/J; Marauders seventh year/intro to the First Wizarding War]
Relationships: James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Lily Evans Potter & Severus Snape, Lily Evans Potter/Original Male Character(s), Remus Lupin & James Potter, Remus Lupin & Lily Evans Potter, Sirius Black & Lily Evans Potter, Sirius Black & Remus Lupin, Sirius Black & Remus Lupin & Peter Pettigrew & James Potter
Comments: 14
Kudos: 40





	1. Chapter 1

**A/N:** I know that Lily/OC is a controversial pairing for most fans of Marauder fiction. If you're a hardcore Lily/James fan like I am, I hope you'll give this a shot--we'll get there, I promise! But if it's not your thing, it's not your thing. I get that, so slut-shaming comments are unnecessary. Please don't even write them.

Halfway to Hogwarts’ front doors and the promise of a full moon night passed in the form of a stag, James Potter froze.

He knew, logically, that he shouldn’t worry about getting caught. He had the invisibility cloak on, after all, and it had never failed him yet. So long as he kept his knees bent to conceal his ankles and didn’t make too much sound, the cloak basically guaranteed that no prefect or professor would detect him. It was easily the best concealment avenue the Marauders had, and since James had it on him, Remus, Sirius, and Peter had been left to conjure Disillusionment Charms. But they had gone ahead earlier in the evening, before curfew and just as the sun set, to make sure Remus was safe in the Shrieking Shack before the full moon hit. They only had to rely on their chameleon-like forms to disguise them as they crossed the Hogwarts grounds, to keep any nosy students from noticing Peter’s transformation, and the subsequent disappearance of the three of them—two students, one rat—under the Whomping Willow.

James had been left behind, grudgingly fulfilling the Head Boy duty of patrolling the castle’s lower levels until one of Hufflepuff’s prefects relieved him at a quarter to ten. The moon was long out by then, the second full moon of his seventh year, and he had cleared the stairs up to Gryffindor tower, to grab the invisibility cloak, in record time.

But now, one of Ravenclaw’s prefects, Alexander Morton, stood in between him and the Grand Staircase.

James didn’t freeze because he doubted that he could slip by Morton undetected, not for a moment. He watched the prefect pace down the hall towards him, and quickly assessed that Morton’s heart was not in patrolling that night. His eyes were locked forward, his stride surprisingly hurried for a routine nighttime patrol, and he didn’t bother to look about him for any truant students hiding in the fourth-floor corridor’s dark shadows. Getting by him wouldn’t even offer a challenge. Not in his state, which was what gave James pause.

Because Morton’s state seemed…distracted.

Against his better judgment, James felt the slight gnaw of curiosity in the pit of his stomach. His desire to join his friends in Hogsmead—the only thought on his mind during his long, fruitless hours of patrol—lessened slightly.

It wasn’t just Morton’s movements that drew his interest. There was something about the look on his face that made James study him closer. He had known Morton for over six years. They had sat in many of the same core classes from sixth year up as they prepared to take their NEWTs, and they had played Quidditch against each other for two years, both Chasers. They were not friends, but might share a friendly word in passing. And across all the years, James had never seen Morton look quite as he did now. His expression reminded James of the look Peter often got on his face when the Marauders planned to break a major rule quite spectacularly—he had looked that way once a month since fifth year, when they had finally succeeded in transforming into their Animagi forms and began to leave the castle regularly on full moons. Something about Morton’s face, pale in his wandlight, echoed that expression, especially in the way he moved his mouth incessantly, his lips never quite settling in one place.

The idea of Morton about to break a rule as serious as that of unregistered Animagi brought a grin to James’ face. While he doubted that Morton had anything quite that intense planned, he’d never known him to get so much as a Ravenclaw house point deducted. What could he be up to? Interest growing, he allowed Morton to walk past him down the corridor, and then turned to silently shadow him, at least for a while.

The lads would understand if he was just a bit later, surely.

James only had to trace Morton’s footsteps for a few more yards. Morton stopped abruptly in front of a classroom door, and now he turned, left and right, to look around him in the most conspicuous manner James had ever seen.

He was clearly very bad at this whole rule-breaking thing.

As Morton surveyed the hallway, James moved closer, sidestepping around him to lean up against the wall right next to where the door would open. He tried to conjure the Marauders Map in his mind, to remember what lay inside this classroom, weighing if he wanted to follow Morton inside, just to satisfy his curiosity before he headed to the Shrieking Shack. This particular stretch of the fourth floor was nothing special, if he recalled correctly. The door across the hall from this classroom opened into a broom cupboard. Further up the corridor, next to a suit of armor, sat the secret passage that he had just taken, which ran the length between the seventh floor and the fourth and had exits on each level. Even further down, around a bend, was the Magical Theory classroom, a required first-year class. Nearby that, Professor Sinestra, the Astronomy instructor, had once had an office, but she’d since moved understandably closer to the Astronomy tower. And James had once hidden from Filch in a vacant classroom nearer to the Grand Staircase, a room filled with dusty desks, many broken, and a chalkboard featuring some of Peeves’ best dirty limericks.

So what was Morton doing amongst all these unexciting rooms, all the while looking like he planned to pull off the world’s biggest heist?

Morton’s eyes remained trained down the corridor towards the Grand Staircase, even as he tapped his wand against the door’s handle, which clicked as the lock gave way. He opened the door and hesitated, turning to look one last time down the other direction of the empty, motionless hall, which provided James with just enough time to dart inside before Morton cast _Nox_ and followed him.

The room was dark, darker still than the dimly-lit corridors. Arched windows graced the wall opposite the door, offering little relief past a bit of watery starlight. James managed to shift sideways, away from Morton, shuffling carefully along the wall. If he made any noise, it was obscured by Morton’s muttering under his breath as he cast a long, complex spell that traced a line of red light around the doorframe. When he finished, the light faded and the door locked again, leaving James with no small measure of surprise, and his curiosity further piqued. Morton hadn’t cast a run-of-the-mill locking charm—this was a spell James had never seen before, something that looked deep and secure and presumably wouldn’t come undone by a simple _Alohomora._ Whatever Morton was up to, he clearly did not want to be disturbed.

As soon as the door locked, a flash of light flared towards the front of the classroom. It wasn’t a brilliant blast by any means, but in the dark classroom it rendered James momentarily blind. He reached up to pinch his nose under the bridge of his glasses, holding his eyes shut to allow them to adjust, and then took in the measure of the room. It looked entirely like the spare classroom that had once served as his hiding place from Filch, down to an identical layout and contents. A series of desks, some missing legs or sporting shattered tops or with seats snapped in half, littered the room haphazardly. A chalkboard spanned the wall at the front of the room, although this one was empty, save for what looked like several decades of chalk dust. In front of the chalkboard sat a desk, larger than the others, meant for the instructor.

James’ stomach did a backflip. He clapped his hand unconsciously over his mouth, an immediate reaction to control himself, to keep from uttering a single noise that would give his presence away.

Lily Evans sat on top of the desk, her legs crossed, holding a weakly-lit lantern that bathed the area around her in a thin, blue-tinged light. She was smiling.

“Are you late or am I early?” she asked Morton casually, the same way she might have if they had just met up at the Transfiguration door, and not in the dead of night.

Morton no longer looked nervous. Now he looked nothing like Peter, James thought, somewhere in the back recesses of his mind that amazingly still functioned. Peter had never looked quite this happy, maybe not even after he’d accomplished two years of hard work to transform for the first time. And Peter had none of Morton’s casual attractiveness. James had never considered Morton’s looks before, but became painfully aware that he was, indeed, a good-looking chap, just from the way that Lily looked at him.

Girls often looked at James like that. But Lily never had.

Morton checked his watch as he wove fluidly around the dilapidated desks. “Neither, actually.” He halted when he reached the front of the desk, and simply stood there, as she simply sat. “We’re actually both early. I think you knew I would be.”

She laughed, low and soft. “Why?”

Now he reached for her, quite suddenly, closing hands around her hips to pull her roughly towards the edge of the desk. His movements had none of the unhurried, easy grace that he had just displayed a moment ago. Now he moved impatiently, clearly frustrated, almost mad. Lily slid along the polished wood easily, forced to unfold her legs as he pressed his body in between her thighs, the force of which lifted the hem of her skirt. He bent to kiss her, but she got there first, lifting herself briefly off the desk so she could pull him down towards her.

James’ brain seemed to scream. His hand remained over his mouth, somehow a very faint comfort, because then he at least knew the sound that pounded in his ears wasn’t coming out of his mouth.

He had seen Lily kiss someone just once before, in their fifth year. She had been on a Hogsmeade date at the Three Broomsticks with Gregory Greg, a Gryffindor lad two years above them. James and the other Marauders had just entered the pub in a blast of cold air, and he spied them as he unwound his scarf while absently looking for a table. He still remembered the moment he saw them together, mainly because he hadn’t expected it—he hadn’t known she even had a date that weekend, although of course she had turned down his offer—and the shock of it had left him unable to look away. It hadn’t even been a snog, but two soft pecks Greg had delivered while passing her a steaming mug of Butterbeer. The familiarity of the act somehow seemed worse than a snog, imparting to him clearly that this had not been their first date or first kiss.

Remus—perhaps seeing that James freeze entirely, scarf still draped around one shoulder, and following his gaze—had been the only one to also see them. “Just remembered—forgot something in Zonko’s—I’ll be right back—here, Prongs, come with me,” he had said to Sirius and Peter briskly, and had grabbed James by the shoulder of his cloak to pull him back out into the cold before anyone could protest.

They had indeed gone back to Zonko’s, but, to James’ relief, Remus hadn’t tried to bring up what had driven them from the Three Broomsticks. He also hadn’t stopped James from picking up several packets of Puking Powder before they left. And, despite his recent prefect status, Remus had pointedly looked the other way when Greg began vomiting profusely at dinner that night, and at several other meals throughout the next couple of weeks. Eventually, perhaps because he never saw them kiss again—and because he ran out of Puking Powder—James had come to accept that Lily and Greg were dating. He had just tried not to think about it. But his overall mood had lifted considerably when winter faded into spring and he saw her in the company of her friends on another Hogsmeade visit, not with Greg. It became clear pretty soon thereafter that they were no longer seeing each other. For weeks after, even Snape couldn’t dull his spirits.

This kiss was infinitely worse. Morton had his hands buried deep in her thick hair, and although the broad expanse of his back blocked Lily’s hands from view, James assumed by her movements that they played down the front of his shirt. She lifted a leg to wrap around his waist, and James could see the muscles contract in her bare thigh as she leaned back slightly and pulled Morton toward her playfully, laughing breathlessly when he had to disengage a hand from her hair to steady himself on the desk.

Worse yet, this wasn’t a simple pub with a door James could easily use. He glanced at the door, but hardly even considered it as an option. Only moments ago, Morton’s complex locking charm had simply furthered his interest, another piece in a curious puzzle; now he realized, foolishly late, that on top of locking anyone out, it also locked him in. How long would it take him to figure out how to lift the charm, when he didn’t even know the incantation, let alone the counter-spell? And even if he could somehow figure out the counter-spell—assuming it didn’t take him an endless number of failed, probably noisy attempts—how could he manage to perform it correctly, with minimal sound, and bolt from the room before Lily or Morton caught him? He only had to imagine the look on Lily’s face if she were to come upon him, crouching by the door with his wand sticking out from the invisibility cloak, to understand how stupid he would have to be to try it. Ignoring them seemed like his best bet, but quickly proved equally fruitless. Even as he tried to focus on a particularly shattered desk in the far corner of the classroom, his eyes came immediately back to their embrace, even as he wanted to look, and be, anywhere else.

“Why?” Morton repeated after her, breaking away from her mouth as he steadied himself, his voice audibly thick. He stood up then and yanked impatiently at the sleeves of his robes, pulling the garment off entirely. The act sent James’ stomach reeling. How far, he suddenly wondered, was this about to go?

Morton came back to her as soon as the garment hit the floor, and Lily slid both legs around his waist this time, drawing his body to fit tightly into hers. She didn’t bother to sit up from where she reclined, leaned back on her elbows, or to pull down hem of her skirt, which had pooled further around her waist. For a second, James forgot where he was, and even forgot the sudden nausea that had swept over his body, entirely transfixed by the exposed pale skin of her upper thigh and the way it curved gracefully into the smooth line of her backside. 

Without thinking, he took several steps away from the wall, moving closer towards the center of the room, intent on finding an angle where he could better see her around Morton’s back. He even forgot, in his pressing intent, to creep with slow, careful steps, but if he made any noise, it was apparently negligible enough that neither Lily nor Morton noticed in their current state. He could see, now, that Lily’s hands had worked to undo the buttons down the front of Morton’s shirt, which hung open. He could also see the look of sheer hunger on Morton’s face as he looked down at her, and how her face flushed in return, but looked comparatively completely composed.

“Tell me what you said to me before Potions.” Morton’s words sounded like an angry demand, but there was something, something pleading about his tone and Lily’s almost casual expression, that made it very clear that he was not the one in charge.

She seemed to know this too, and to find it at least passingly amusing, because she laughed again, only to stop rather short when Morton once again gripped her hips, his hands this time closing around bare skin. Despite this obvious distraction, her voice came out impressively even. “I told you,” she said simply, “That I didn’t have knickers on today.”

“And?” Morton sounded strangled.

“And that I’d been thinking about you.”

“Fuck,” Morton swore, hushed and intense under his breath, and although Lily’s legs didn’t move from tightly around him, he stepped back just enough, creating the space necessary to push up the front of her skirt up, which left her entirely exposed from the waist down. “Jesus fuck,” he muttered, almost reverent, intoning a muggle swear that James had only ever heard from Lily, something she’d thrown out angrily more than once during the heat of one of their arguments. But Morton no longer sounded angry, just equally as desperate.

Even as shame coursed hotly through his body, looking at the delicate patch of hair between Lily’s legs, James felt his cock begin to harden.

Lily relaxed against the hand that Morton wedged between their bodies, letting out the softest of sighs, almost more of a hum, and closed her eyes. Despite the tension that roped across his body, Morton exhibited obvious restraint when he began to stroke her gently, almost worshipfully, rather than with the frantic force he palpably desired. “You seemed kind of distracted after that,” she said as she opened her eyes, and here her voice shook for the first time, just the slightest of tremors that seemed to stem from the observation of his face, and the expression on it as he watched himself touch her. “Your Scintillation Solution was a right mess. Slughorn looked pretty disappointed.”

“Distracted,” Morton repeated darkly, watching as she lifted her hips to wordlessly cajole him to touch her with greater pressure, and looking gratified at the frustrated exhalation that wound its way out of her throat. “Of course I was fucking distracted. And I’m sure Slughorn would understand if you had told _him_ that you—”

“Don’t!” she exclaimed, sitting up abruptly and pushing him back with two hands against his chest, although not with any real force. “Don’t bring him up when—”

“I won’t,” he agreed quickly, eagerly, moving to part her legs again, and failing as she gave him several sharp swats. “I won’t! Although to be fair, you brought him up.”

She rolled her eyes. “As banter. But to bring up me saying—”

“I get it. Completely understood. Problem solved.” As she aimed one last smack, he caught her hand in the air with fast Quidditch reflexes, and pressed it against the straining crotch of his trousers. “But, fuck, just let me touch you, Lily, or touch me. _Fuck_.”

The desperation in his tone didn’t soften her mildly irritated expression, but somehow changed it, a decidedly different, but no less dangerous, gleam reaching her eyes. She drew both hands to his waist, mouth hot on his neck, and unbuckled his belt, her movements sure and unhurried. “Did you touch yourself after Potions?” she asked, her voice barely audible over his choked breath when she snuck a hand over the waistband of his trousers.

His mouth found hers. “Of course I did,” he managed, pulling at her robes, and her face blazed with pleasure. He made an impatient noise when she pulled away to slip her arms from her robes, but he quickly switched tactics, fumbling with the white buttons of her blouse with surprising skill, considering his rush. “You know I did. You wanted me to.”

Lily didn’t bother to deny it. “I did,” she agreed simply, and slipped off the desk to help him with her clothes.

**xxx**

James found himself rather outside his body.

His horror at his situation had somehow shifted imperceptibly to desire, so gradually that his increasingly-clouded brain couldn’t quite follow the transformation. It had started (he would decide later, with no insignificant amount of shame) the second he’d seen the muscles flex under Lily’s bare leg. And shortly thereafter, everything seemed to go suddenly sideways, as he watched the cool expression on her face never falter while she revealed that she hadn’t been wearing knickers in Potions. His mind seemed to completely separate that fact from the fact that she’d done it, and said it, to rile up Morton. No, all James could think about was how he sat two tables behind her in Potions, how he’d looked at her more than once—out of habit, truly, though not a habit he minded—and if he had known she’d sat there, calmly shelling Runespoor eggs for her Scintillation Solution, without a shred on under her skirt, he would have lost it.

He was already hard, uncomfortably and then almost painfully so, by the time Lily’s skirt came up. As Morton began to touch her, the almost inaudible sound of pleasure that came from the back of her throat, the thought of what she must feel like, and how it would feel to make her make that noise, combined to drive James over the edge. When she’d reached for Morton’s belt, he’d gone for his own, fingers shaking and mind all but blank, but aware somewhere, instinctually, that he had to be as quiet as possible.

Any chance he had to second-guess his desire to watch flew out the window the moment he wrapped his hand around his cock.

He’d dreamt about her before, of course, especially frequently in those early years, at the beginning of fourth year, when he’d first started noticing her in a way beyond how much fun it was to get her angry. (Although, maybe the attraction had been there always, and had driven his actions even before he could realize why he so enjoyed seeing her face flush with rage.) She wasn’t all he’d gotten off to over the years that had passed (although, to his intense shame, he had thought of her more than once during encounters with other girls). But she was his most consistent fantasy, one that bordered on compulsion. He had imagined having her in dozens of different ways, some utterly filthy and some sweet, almost romantic, and he wasn’t sure which bothered him more.

But in all that time, he had never imagined her quite like this.

And it wasn’t just because she was with someone who wasn’t him, although, logically, that should have been the starkest difference from his usual masturbatory material. No, absurdly—as he only recognized later on, following the return of his full competence—after his initial discomfort and violent jealousy, it became disturbingly effortless to simply filter Morton out of the equation and imagine himself there instead. He could watch Morton pull at the zipper of her skirt with such ferocity that it snapped, and immediately imagine himself in that place instead. It came only too easily.

James’ entire field of vision seemed dominated by her, and everything else fell away. He could only focus on the abstract, like the utter pale flawlessness of her skin, which bore no tan to differentiate the color of her limbs from that of her breasts or backside, although he could only assume that the latter two parts had never seen the sun. She had freckles on her shoulders, though, and also scattered lightly down the long line of her back, and he fought a frantic urge to count them. He found himself transfixed at the sight of her breasts, and not simply because they were breasts or because they were hers, but because her nipples were darker than he’d ever imagined, almost rouged in the lantern-light. And he became momentarily overwhelmed with the feverish thought that, no matter how he had pictured her breasts before—and in that moment, he wasn’t sure, because his brain honestly couldn’t recall anything he’d ever imagined, anything _ever_ , not just his fantasies about her—the way she looked was somehow better.

He watched, utterly amazed, at the different expressions that played over her face as she played different roles. Initially she was almost docile, her face dreamy, as she leaned once again onto the desk and allowed Morton’s hand to resume work between her legs. At first, the uneven pace of her breathing and the occasional quiet noise—louder than a sigh, but less than a moan—were the only evidence of her pleasure she’d allow to show. Then, slowly, her impatience broke through once again. Her forehead wrinkled and she bit her lip as she brought Morton’s free hand to her breast and lifted her hips higher, twisting in apparent dissatisfaction against the hand between her legs. James knew, from the frustrated moan that finally escaped her lips, that she needed something—more pressure, more speed, just something more—and a deep ache filled his stomach, not unlike hunger but also somehow entirely different, out of sheer longing to give it to her.

Clearly displeased, she changed tactics and switched to the aggressor. In mere second, she had Morton away from her and then directed him—led, quite literally, by the cock, her hand moving upon him with slow strokes—across the top of the desk and onto his back. And now her face took on that wonderfully mischievous expression that she’d worn moments before, when she’d reveled in the upper hand she had held over Morton in Potions. James decided that he loved the sight of that expression the most, and became frustrated himself when the long curtain of her hair momentarily obscured her face as she slid atop Morton and bent to kiss his neck.

“You’re killing me,” Morton ground out, the first words spoken in a long time, and the intent behind his voice seemed to honestly suggest that he meant it. It was clear why. Straddled across his lap, Lily slid herself along the length of his cock, setting a slow, repetitious pace without ever taking him inside her.

“Am I?” she asked, pulling her hair aside so that it fell away from her face and down one shoulder. Although she sounded controlled, especially compared to him, the way she stared down at his apparent torment revealed she may have been just as bothered.

“ _Yes.”_ He bit the word out with considerable strain, taking hold of her hips in a desperate bid to thrust inside her.

She sat up to remove his hands, wove her fingers through his, and then leaned back down to the spot she’d left at his neck, pinning a hand on either side of his head. “You were killing me, and wouldn’t give me what I wanted,” she said simply.

He clearly could have broken free at any time, but he didn’t so much as try, although the muscles in his arms contracted briefly as he squeezed her hands hard enough to turn her fingers red. When he caught himself, he released the pressure. “I’m sorry. Is that what you want to hear?” She lifted a shoulder in a shrug that he must have felt rather than seen. “But you—” He broke off, his voice failing. “Fuck—you’re so _wet.”_

For the first time, she seemed to lose a bit of her self-assured steel. Her cheeks grew darker, past arousal and into a blush, although, with her face now at his chest and her movements never faltering, Morton seemed oblivious to the change. “I was wet before,” she pointed out reproachfully, looking up at him through her eyelashes briefly before she worked her way up the other side of his neck. If James hadn’t been able to see the faltering expression written on her face, he may have missed the faint disgruntled ring in her voice. She sounded almost as if she were mad that her body’s reactions had revealed that not only was she not as in charge of the situation as she would have liked, but that she felt every bit as aroused as he did.

“Fucking hell, I’m _sorry_. How do I—do you want me to beg? Because that’s what I wanted from you—”

She cut him off wordlessly by giving him what he wanted, and took him slowly inside her, but not before she’d lifted to hover above him so she could watch his face while she did.

And later, when she came, she gave him what she wanted back and lost herself a bit, and, watching her, James found that that abandon was what he had wanted from her all along too. Her hips lost their even rhythm, and she reached, suddenly, to where his hands had again locked tightly on her hips, and gripped his wrists, as if to steady herself through him. The noise that followed wasn’t louder than any other she’d made, but there was something in its ringing, raw intensity that made James come too.

**xxx**

If he had been outside his body before, James wasn’t sure where he was after he came. Somewhere even further from himself than that.

As the throbbing in his cock subsided, and his brain seemed to make its way back, if not to his body, at least to orbiting the area around him, he heard Morton groan.

“No, stop it.” James opened eyes he couldn’t remember closing to see Morton pull Lily back as she’d tried to slip off of him. He used more strength than he had the entire time she had tormented him, as if he’d just remembered that he was stronger than her. Maybe he had. “I can’t move, and I don’t want to leave yet.”

“Leave from inside me or from the room?” Lily asked, her mouth slightly muffled into his chest where he’d pulled her head.

Morton sighed, the deepest sigh James had ever heard—as if, on top of remembering that he was stronger than Lily, he had only now remembered how to breathe too—and draped his free arm across his eyes, grinning. “Yes.”

She pressed the palm of her hand flat against his chest, and propped her chin upon it to look at him. “Was I too horrible in Potions earlier?” The question sounded neither remorseful or like a challenge, just merely curious.

“No,” Morton replied contentedly, with clear, simple honesty. “Never wear knickers. And tell me about it every day.”

“I did feel rather bad,” she admitted reluctantly, though she laughed lightly as she watched him. “It was the look on your face. I’ve never seen you so shocked. How many times did Luke ask if were okay?” she asked, naming the other seventh-year Ravenclaw who shared their potions table, if James recalled correctly.

“A dozen? I think he thought I was having a fit.”

“You kind of were.”

“You have no idea.” Reluctance played over Morton’s features as Lily sat up, and he gave a short, soft hiss that sounded like loss as she climbed off of him, disengaging their bodies entirely. He watched as she picked up the ravaged pieces of her skirt, and rolled to swing his legs over the side of the desk, his movements rather sluggish. “Can I fix it for you?” he asked almost formally, like one would offer a simple healing charm to a distant friend. “I did break it.”

By then, Lily already had her wand out, and repaired the zipper easily. “I got it,” she said, stepping into the skirt, which she fitted around her waist and then zipped. “But you’re on duty. We should go.”

Morton snorted contemptuously, but began pulling on his slacks nonetheless. “Like anyone will notice. I’m only worried about the Head Girl docking points, if I’m honest.”

“You joke, but I absolutely could. Although then I might have to explain why, and that could get messy.”

Messy.

As they dressed, James wiped his sticky hand down the side of his trousers. More than anything, he wanted to cast _Scourgify_ on his entire self—on his hands, his trousers, his underwear, his robes, and, increasingly, his brain, which began to fill with the familiar feeling of the horrid, hot shame that he had felt initially, before his arousal had managed to clear his mind entirely.

What had he just seen? And what had he just _done?_

“When do I patrol next week?” Morton asked as he retrieved and passed her her robes.

“Haven’t even thought about it. Wednesday? And maybe Saturday too? Are you off Quidditch?”

“As long as it’s late enough, I can do it.” He paused. “You could join me.”

Finished dressing, Lily took the time to run her fingers through her hair, hunting for any possible snarls, and to double-check the buttons on her shirt. She shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Will you tell me in Potions?”

“Or Charms, maybe. I haven’t seen you make an arse out of yourself in front of Flitwick yet.”

Their banter now seemed so casual and friendly that James could almost believe Lily was talking to someone like Remus—or hell, even to him—although her tone always carried more acid when they verbally volleyed. The conversation hardly seemed like the pillow talk of lovers, which seemed to add to the unreality of the situation. James hurriedly zipped up his trousers, trying to ignore the general feeling of uncleanliness that permeated both his body and mind.

Lily and Morton parted ways at the door. Morton paused to pull her in for a kiss, and she obliged, slipping back into his arms to run a hand through his hair. Then, as if totally unbothered, she stepped away to trace the doorframe with her wand. The counter-spell seemed somehow longer than the original incantation, unless it was James’ deep desire for escape that caused the seconds to tick by slower now than they had before. When the lock released, she nudged Morton towards the door. “You first. I’ll get the light and follow after a bit.”

He kissed her one last time before he stole out the door. True to her word, Lily extinguished the lantern with a wave of her wand, and then she waited, in the dark, for enough time to pass so she could discreetly leave. James could hardly make her out in the near pitch black of the room, other than her motionless outline that accompanied the faint sound of her breath. Hearing it, he became scared to breathe himself.

When she finally left without a sound, he took in and let out a breath so heavy that it left him lightheaded. Even though he had just wanted nothing more than to escape, now he lingered behind, undoing his trousers again so he could cast the cleaning spells he desperately needed. But even after his clothes nearly sparkled, he couldn’t shake the overall feeling of filth.

More than an hour would pass before he finally mustered up the strength of mind to leave the room and join his mates on the grounds.


	2. Chapter 2

In the handful of days that followed, James felt positively haunted.

His transformation into a stag that night had provided brief but total relief. Thoughts didn’t disappear in his Animagus form, but they did become simpler, and the sheer complexity of the emotions that had roiled in his stomach—overwhelming guilt and shame, certainly, but also a returning sense of jealousy and a small but undeniable sense of satisfaction, the latter which only made him feel worse—simply couldn’t translate to his stag brain. Sirius had once joked that, in dog form, he only experienced doggy thoughts and emotions—hunger, primarily, but also the desire to play and shag that he assumed all dogs constantly felt. “How is that different from your normal self?” Peter had asked dryly, with only a trace of humor, which hadn’t abated Sirius’ laughter in the least. But James understood what Sirius meant. As a stag, all he really cared about was running, as fast and as far and for as long as he could. And the small part of his mind that remained almost human always focused totally on keeping Remus-as-Moony in line. Some nights proved harder than others in that regard, and the October full moon was one of those nights.

“It’s probably because I transfigured at home for three months,” Remus reasoned just after dawn the next morning, as the four of them—exhausted and rather bruised and beaten, but overall cheerful—sat at a table in the kitchens. In the almost two dozen months that had passed since their first transformation together in fifth year, he had stopped apologizing for any minor wounds or injuries he inflicted on them, but he had learned several healing spells on his own, outside of class. He typically gave himself the worst of it on rough nights, and he carefully drew his wand along a long scratch that ran from his shoulder to elbow, knitting the skin back together until only a faint scar remained. “It’s harder alone, and there’s nowhere to really run there.”

Peter grinned as a trio of house elves delivered several platters of food to their table. “Cheers!” he said eagerly, and they beamed back, clearly pleased, before retreating. “It didn’t help that Prongs was hours late,” he said, though without negativity, as he speared a sausage onto his fork. “I can’t exactly help keep you in line, Moony. All you’d need to do is step on me.”

“Or he could eat you,” Sirius said mildly, as almost more of a suggestion. “But I doubt you’d taste very good.”

“Agreed.”

“Gerroff, Moony!” Sirius elbowed Remus away from examining the cut on his cheek, and then scrunched his face in silent apology when his friend flinched in suppressed pain. “I’ll live until after breakfast. Eat something.” He flapped a hand towards the food before rounding on James, looking and sounding far more accusatory than Peter had. “Where _were_ you, Prongs? What, did you have to punish some out-of-bed first years for an entire two hours?”

James choked down the eggs in his mouth. He hadn’t quite forgotten what he’d seen between Lily and Morton—in the light of the day, he wondered dully if he’d _ever_ forget—but Sirius’ question conjured the images back to the forefront of his mind. His food suddenly looked less appetizing. “Peeves was roving around the Entrance Hall, trying to knock over the house point hourglasses,” he lied. “I thought about trying to slip out the door past him, but didn’t want to chance it, even with the cloak. You’d know he’d raise hell if he saw me.”

Peter and Remus seemed to take this explanation in stride, but Sirius continued to look at him strangely. “Weird he’d stay on something like that for two hours with no results. Usually when something is tough he moves onto something easier real quick.”

James shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you, mate.” After a moment, Sirius seemed to accept this line of reasoning, and began eating.

James couldn’t remember the last time he’d so much as attempted to lie to his friends, and it made him feel even worse.

**xxx**

After a meal and a couple hours of quick rest, James’ general feeling of uncleanliness had dissipated slightly, but still clawed at his chest. He assumed that seeing Lily in class could only exacerbate things, and considered skivving off morning Transfiguration just to avoid her. He worried, on top of everything else, that his friends would manage to read all over his face whatever discomfort he expected to feel when he saw her, and he wasn’t sure how he would it explain away.

But, as he found out upon arriving to class a few minutes before the bell, he mostly felt fine. In the morning light, chatting amiably to Hestia Jones and sitting in her normal desk towards the front of the room, Lily looked entirely like herself. He almost couldn’t recognize the girl he had seen the previous night in the prim Head Girl before him, but when she laughed and pulled her hair over her shoulder, the two Lilys seemed to reconcile in his mind, and he grimaced.

Only Remus, ever observant, seemed to notice. “Sorry last night was such shit,” he muttered, his voice low so Sirius and Peter wouldn’t overhear.

He clearly thought James’ expression stemmed from fatigue or pain or something that came back to his transformation the night before. James’ guilt only increased. “Nah, Moony, it’s not that,” he assured him, trying to sound as light and carefree as possible as he patted him on the back. “It’s just…” He couldn’t even summon an excuse.

He hadn’t meant to glance back at Lily, had actually intended to look anywhere but towards her, but he seemed, yet again, to lack any sort of control over himself. Remus nodded, as if he understood. “You quarreling with Lily?”

“No,” James replied, relieved he could actually answer honestly. They hadn’t yet passed the second month of the schoolyear, true, but he might have broken his record for the longest he’d gone without having some sort of altercation with her. The closest they had come to an argument had taken place on the Hogwarts Express, when he had shown up in the prefects’ compartment with the Head Boy badge pinned to his robes. At first, she hadn’t believed it actually belonged to him, and had insisted, with growing frustration, that he must have nicked it off the actual Head Boy. Only when he produced the letter giving him the assignment, signed by Dumbeldore and McGonagall, did she begin to believe him, although not before muttering something about enchanted parchment and forgeries. She’d fired several louder, sarcastic comments his way, questioning his suitability for the post, and had seemed surprised when he hadn’t taken the bait to banter back. But he couldn’t really defend himself against her acidic remarks—he had no idea how he’d come by the assignment either. Since then, she hadn’t taken up the argument with him again, and had acted cordially in the weekly meetings they held with the other houses’ prefects, an attitude he returned, trying his best not to annoy her.

“Huh.” Remus gave a brief, huffing laugh. “Kinda surprised.”

“Not as much as I am.”

After Transfiguration, James got through the day without much incident, distracted enough by his classes and his friends to keep the previous night firmly from his mind. The problem only reared its ugly head again once he crawled gratefully into bed that night. Despite his overwhelming physical exhaustion, he found he couldn’t sleep, because he saw her every time he closed his eyes.

He could picture, only too clearly, all of the intimate sights and sounds of her arousal—and not only could he picture her, but, no matter how hard he tried to suppress it, that was all he could think about. He couldn’t stop recalling the deep redness of her mouth, or the way her stomach tightened as she grew closer to climax, with her arms and legs soon following suit, until the tension finally broke as she came. He remembered the way her laugh sounded different when she teased, softer and lower in the depths of her throat than the bright peals of laughter she often gave around her friends. Mostly, he thought about how much she clearly enjoyed being in control—of herself, of Morton, of the situation—and how the sight of her desire had utterly changed the way that he desired her.

And, because he did desire her, then more than in any time past, his body took over what his mind protested, and he got himself off to the thought of her. Again.

As days slipped by, one melting into the next, James felt as if his life had shifted into the worst sort of patterns. He spent his days forcefully and decidedly not thinking about her, even in classes or the Great Hall or the common room, where he couldn’t escape the sight of her. And when night came, when all distractions ceased, he became first a man obsessed, and then—after he gave in, jerked off, and came—a man in a deep shame spiral.

Wednesday night passed, and he knew Morton patrolled the hallways that night. He kept the lads up with him later than usual, desperate for the company, which they thankfully didn’t question. Even after Remus and Peter dropped off, Sirius stayed awake with him long into the night, and they quietly discussed Quidditch across the space between their beds. By the time Sirius finally fell into a soft snore, James knew Morton had to have finished his shift, and his breathing came a bit easier.

**xxx**

Yet amongst all these uncomfortable new feelings, the strangest need of all built steadily across the days, until James could no longer avoid recognizing what he truly wanted.

He really wanted to talk to Lily about everything.

He wrote off the impulse at first as a passing flight of bizarre fancy. After all, he had spent the entirety of his time locked in the classroom with her and Morton trying desperately to keep quiet so they wouldn’t discover him. And when he’d left the room, after giving his clothes a second round of cleaning spells, he had sworn to himself that he would never talk about what he’d seen, to anyone—because he felt terrible about it, sure, but also because he had no idea what she would do to him if she found out, only that it wouldn’t be good. She would undoubtedly hex him into the next year, and he also entirely expected that she’d never talk to or even look at him again. And that was the last thing he wanted, especially when things had actually become, if not good, at least okay between them. He rather liked that he could speak to her in prefect meetings and she typically responded without rancor. Sometimes she even joked, or laughed at his jokes, the latter which felt even sweeter.

And besides, he told himself as the impulse grew louder hourly, what would he even say?

But it was an impulse, and he had always been notoriously impulsive.

**xxx**

“Do you think the Slytherin prefects are actually monitoring their own house? I feel like every time we meet, they show up with reports of all the points they’ve taken from other students, but never one of their own.”

Even as Lily mused, James still marveled at the fact that she walked by his side congenially, and spoke to him, if not as a friend, at least like a colleague, as they made their way back to Gryffindor tower after the latest prefect meeting. And she actually paused, and waited for him to respond to her question, as if his opinion mattered and she took his word seriously.

“I’d wager they don’t,” he replied, waiting as the next set of stairs in the Grand Staircase floated towards them and slid into place, which they climbed to the fifth-floor landing. “But do you really expect them to? I don’t. I never did. They—hey, wait,” he said quickly as she began up the steps to the sixth floor. He nodded down the fifth-floor corridor, deserted save for a roving cluster of Hufflepuff girls headed their way. “There’s a secret passage this way. I’ll show you.”

He didn’t plan it. He offered the words entirely spontaneously, and as soon as he said them, he wanted nothing more than to reach out and take them back.

Lily hesitated, hand on the railing, and he thought, with undeniable relief (and disappointment—was that mingled in there too?), that at first she would decline. But then, she simply shrugged. “Yeah, alright.” His heart fluttered wildly as she followed him down the corridor, winding left and then right, aware that at no other point in their Hogwarts careers would she have ever agreed to follow him anywhere. “How do you know about this?” she asked as they approached an ordinary-looking set of armor to the left of a tapestry of Alberta Toothill, a medieval witch famous for dueling that James only recognized from a Chocolate Frog card.

“Oh, you know.” He hoped he sounded nonchalant. “I’ve spent a fair bit of time exploring.”

“I _do_ know. How many house points have I taken off you since fifth year?” she asked, and while the Head Girl in her sounded annoyed, her curiosity bested her when he gestured to the armor. “Is this how you get around the castle?”

That and a hundred other internal, and seven external, passageways, he thought. “Partly,” he hedged, and then quickly moved on before she could ask for clarification. “Okay, watch.” After a sharp look around to confirm that the hallway was, indeed, deserted, he squeezed the joint at the elbow of the suit of armor furthest from Alberta Toothill’s tapestry. The bare stone beside the knight split, silently widening into a horizontal gap large enough for him to duck through. She followed without hesitation.

The passageway was entirely dark, but James knew the area well enough that he didn’t need to see. He groped just above his head, and found an unlit sconce on the wall. He lit it with a wordless tap of his wand, and while they both blinked at the light from the conjured flame, he commanded again, “Watch.” He pushed on the sconce, and after a bit of pressure, it sank just slightly into the wall and in mere seconds the opening closed.

“This is wild,” Lily marveled as she lit her wand to better investigate the entirety of her surroundings.

There wasn’t much to see. The landing they stood on held the two of them comfortably enough, but was small enough that James knew, from experience, that he and the other Marauders could not all fit. When together, at least two of them had to stand on the winding spiral stairs that branched off, one set leading up and the other leading down.

“This runs from the fourth floor up to the seventh,” he explained, watching as she held her wand above her head and lifted herself up onto her toes to look as high as she could into the darkness above. He tried to ignore the way that her hair seemed to reflect the torchlight.

“So, what, you squeeze the armor to get in?”

“On the elbow, yeah. There’s a little nob to push inwards. And then you close it with the wall sconce.”

“Brilliant,” she murmured, and she stepped closer to him so she could run her palm across the wall where the opening had disappeared. She seemed entirely unaware that her robes brushed his, and he added that fact to the growing list of things he tried not to notice. “So we can take this to up near common room?”

“Yes.” He cleared his throat, happy for the distraction. “You enter and exit the same way on each floor. You can tell where the armor is on each level because they’re always grouped in fives.”

“Are they normally not?”

“No. Not that I’ve ever seen.”

She looked up at him, unmistakably impressed. “That’s…incredibly observant.” It may have been the first genuine compliment she’d ever given him.

He looked away. “Yeah, well…uh, Filch knows about this one, I think, although I’ve never seen him here, fortunately. And the lads know, of course, but I don’t know if anyone else does.” He hadn’t considered, until he spoke, that he had never shown another soul any of the secret passageways he knew about—had never even contemplated it—but had taken her without a second thought.

Impulsive.

“Mum’s the word,” she agreed, before he even had to ask. She started up the stone steps. “Show me where it comes out.”

“Uh, wait.” And there they were again, impulsive words that he wanted to take back, but before he could stop himself, he added to them quickly, in almost all one word, “I wanted to talk to you.”

She stopped and leaned up against the wall, still a couple steps above him, almost at his height. “Yeah?”

Meeting her eyes reminded him, in real time, what a bad idea it al was. “Never mind. C’mon, the passage comes out near the entrance to the Astronomy tower, so you have to be careful about classes—”

“No, what?” she persisted, and he wondered, based on how she looked at him, if she pushed him because of something she saw on his face. She narrowed her eyes slightly. “You’re not going to try to put it on me, are you?” but her tone sounded nowhere near as hostile as it would have in the past, more of a threatening joke than a mere threat. “Because I will hex you, Potter.”

Any other time it might have made him laugh, or at least given him joy to see her tease him so easily, but he could only feel the overwhelming urge to flee. She didn’t move, and he couldn’t get by her. He had nowhere he could go but back out the passage, or down the secret stairs to escape out onto the fourth floor, but both options seemed equally cowardly. At least, that was what he told himself in the split second it took him to overcome the reasoning in the better part of his brain that demanded he stay silent.

He spilled his guts.

“I saw you last week. On Friday.”

He had worked so hard to keep his tone anything but accusatory that instead the words came out flat, which clearly confused her. She stared at him for several seconds. “Yeah, I’m sure you did. We have classes together.”

“No, I mean…that night. I saw you. With Morton.”

Even though she stood still, somehow his words made her entire body visibly freeze further, as if every muscle contracted under her robes. That tension, along with the look on her face, reminded James in a wild flash of a dangerous cat about to pounce.

She said nothing.

He broke the silence first. “I didn’t mean to!” He dropped any pretense of controlling his voice, which sounded panicky to his own ears, and launched into an overly-detailed, and completely unprompted, explanation. “I got done with patrol and left the common room to go meet up with the lads—they were already out, um, around elsewhere in the castle—and he was patrolling the fourth floor when I left this passage. I was gonna just go around him, but he looked so…” He struggled to find the word. “He looked so _stupid_ , like—like he was breaking the rules or something, and it was so obvious that…I followed him.”

She continued to stare at him impassively. “And?” she asked quietly.

He took a deep breath. “I followed him into the room.”

A deafening silence followed. James only had a few seconds to feel it fester before a sudden prickling overcame the back of his neck. He had just enough time to thrust his hand into his pocket for his wand and conjure a shield charm before Lily threw something at him, a dark red, angry hex that he didn’t recognize. The spell obliterated his shield, but not until after it had already protected him.

She turned away sharply and took three more steps up the stairs, just enough for James to think she planned to storm off, before she whirled around and came back down, joining him on the landing. Even though she once again stood shorter than him, he had never felt her loom so large, or felt smaller in comparison to her.

“What the _fuck,_ Potter.” It might have been better if she’d shouted, but she didn’t need to. Her face was red, redder than he’d ever seen it, not in all the years he’d practically made a profession out of annoying and angering her.

“I didn’t know!” he broke in quickly, and as he watched her swell indignantly, he added, “It’s not an excuse, I know—and I’m not trying to make excuses, Evans, I swear—but I didn’t know you were in there! And I didn’t know…what…you were doing,” he finished, rather lamely, and he felt heat creep up his chest and into his face.

“So you just _followed_ someone without _any_ reason and _happened_ to end up in one of several dozen _unused_ classrooms just when I _happened_ to be there?” She spat out the words so harshly that he had a hard time picking out which ones she meant to emphasize and which ones she didn’t.

“I get it—it sounds like hogwash, especially when you put it that way. But…that’s honestly exactly what happened.”

“Bullshit.”

“Come off it. How could I even know you were in there?” He felt a twinge of dishonesty, because he could have easily known if he’d had the Marauders Map. But she didn’t even know of the map’s existence, so she couldn’t call it out as a lie. And besides, he hadn’t checked the map. His friends had had it on them.

“Maybe you saw me go in and followed me, not him,” she countered.

Okay, that actually made a lot of sense.

“I didn’t,” was all he could say to defend himself. “Honestly—I will swear it to you until I’m blue in the face, Evans— _I didn’t know_. I thought…I don’t know, I thought Morton was up to something ridiculous and I got curious and followed him. Anyone who saw him would have known he was up to something. It showed all over his face. But I didn’t know you were there. I swear.”

She said nothing.

“And I couldn’t leave,” he continued, unable to stop himself. “He locked the door before I even knew you were there, and then I couldn’t get out, because I didn’t know the counter-spell and I knew you’d find me if I even tried to figure it out, and even if I did try, I’ve never seen that spell, so there’s no way—”

“So you just stayed? And what, watched?”

He didn’t respond, only too aware that she still held her wand in her hand, clutched so tightly that her fingers had gone white. When her wand hand moved, he hastily threw up another shield, but no attack came. She had only moved to pocket her wand. After several long moments of staring at each other through the shimmering haze, he lowered the shield.

“I’m going to assume that’s a yes,” she said coldly.

He could no longer look at her, and his ears burned as well.

Another silence descended, which left James feeling not unlike a trapped mouse in her claws.

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked finally.

“I don’t know.” She opened her mouth furiously, clearly unsatisfied with his answer, but her cut her off with a surprisingly sharp wave of his hand. “I really don’t!” he insisted, and he felt his own anger bubbling up, born out of the culmination of several days spent wallowing in crushing guilt, and from the frustration he felt at himself for following his boneheaded need to talk to her about any of it. His words flew out, blunt and honest. “I had no plan when I brought you in here, and I have no plan now—even as I’m talking right now—about how I’m going to get out of this. I’m impulsive, and I didn’t think it through. I don’t think _a lot_ of things through, clearly. I followed a bloke into a dark classroom without thinking about the consequences or what I’d do if I needed to leave, just because he looked like he was up to something! I had no reason to do that. I just felt like it. And I just felt like I should talk to you about this.”

He worried that his abrupt flash of anger might only escalate hers, but strangely, it seemed to have a contrary effect. If none of the fury visibly left her face, a flicker of curiosity at least joined the expression. “You don’t make any sense,” she told him matter-of-factly. “ _Why_ would you ever tell me you were there?”

“Because I feel weird being around you now!” he exploded, and he flinched, even as she didn’t, at the sound of his own voice echoing through the tall, narrow passageway.

“ _You_ feel weird? _You_ do? How do you think _I_ feel? I’m the one—”

“I watched you shag another bloke, Evans!” And there it was, what he had danced around saying the entire time. He inhaled sharply, ready for her to fire something back, but when nothing came, he barreled on, not even sure what he planned to say. “And I felt like shit, for a lot of reasons, but mainly because I knew that I knew that I saw you, and you had no idea. And that felt _incredibly_ fucked up, because—look, this year you’ve been talking to me almost like we’re friends, and I can’t handle you treating me that way if you didn’t know I was there. I know I’ve been a right git to you for years, and I definitely deserved every time you ever yelled at me or hexed me or took house points away or whatever, but…this is the worst thing I’ve ever done, even though I didn’t mean to do it. You just—you needed to know, because I feel guilty every time you even just ask my opinion about the ruddy Slytherin prefects. I can’t handle you not knowing, especially when you’re nice to me.”

He hadn’t known he felt that way, not really, until he’d said it.

She scoffed and, again, turned to leave, but didn’t even take a step this time before she spun back around, her face rigidly set. “No,” she said, almost to herself, before she turned flashing eyes on him. “I’m not going to leave, because I have no reason to be embarrassed. _You_ should be embarrassed.”

The sudden pivot stunned him more than any hex. “What?”

She exhaled slowly, as if willing herself to calm down, and some of the color did leave her face. “ _You_ should be embarrassed,” she repeated, with exaggerated patience. “Okay, you didn’t mean to be there. You didn’t know I was there. I believe you.”

He stared. “No you don’t.”

“Don’t tell me how I feel!” she snapped, briefly breaking her more measured tone before she put it back on like an audible mask. “Whatever, let’s say I do. Let’s say I believe it. And let’s say that I also believe that you had no choice but to stay there—and I’d actually believe that, because there was no way you were undoing that locking charm. Morton made it up himself.”

“He can do that?” James asked, and then wished he hadn’t, because it didn’t matter, it was neither here nor there, and it sounded stupid.

She ignored him. “Let’s also say that I believe that it makes you feel bad, because… I’m being nice to you now, by your reasoning? Which, for the record, I’ve only been nice to you because you haven’t tried to antagonize me yet this year, although this whole stunt—” She cut herself off. “That doesn’t matter. What matters is, let’s just say that I believe you on all of that.”

It felt entirely like a trap, as did the pointed look she gave him while she waited for him to respond. “Okay?”

She nodded, as if accepting that he followed her logic, despite his uncertain answer. “But even if I believed those things—and I’m not saying that I do, mind, this is all hypothetical—I have no reason to feel embarrassed, because I was doing something I thought was private, and I had no way of knowing it had _turned into a show_.”

Her last words dripped with acid, but he couldn’t disagree with that.

“But _you_ …” And her eyes began to glitter like jewels, but like cursed, dangerous jewels. “Potter, even if you couldn’t leave, no one said you had to _watch_.”

“I tried not to!” he defended, but it rang hollowly. “But what else was I supposed to do?”

“Put a silencing charm on your ears, and a blinding spell on your eyes,” she shot back, as if she’d expected the question. “You can do those wordlessly, I’d imagine, and take them off the same.”

“You would have seen the spells,” he replied, feeling rather lame.

“Maybe. I suppose the cast would have disrupted the Disillusionment Charm.”

It took him a moment to realize what she meant, but then it clicked. She had no way of knowing about the invisibility cloak, of course. He made himself nod.

“But the point stands that, even if you couldn’t cast magic, you could have turned away. You didn’t have to watch us, and you already admitted you did.” She tilted her head in a pantomime of exaggerated curiosity. _“Why?”_

Somehow, the way she looked at him was worse than anger, and he almost wished she would lift her wand again. He could battle any spell she threw at him unless she caught him unaware, because dueling had always come easier to him than it had to her. But he read something in her expression that made him feel like he had no weapon against wherever she planned to go with this line of questioning. “Why what?”

_“Why did you watch, Potter?”_ She enunciated each word so carefully that her voice came out as a hiss. “And—”

There was something about the look on her face that made James realize, with a sick, swooping feeling in his stomach, that he knew where she was going. She looked entirely as she had when she’d come into the upper hand against Morton—well, almost entirely. As she stood before him, he could see nothing playful in her expression except for maybe a sense of dark satisfaction in her eyes. She felt in control, and he had no way of wresting that away from her.

“—what did you _do_ while you watched?”

James knew, in that moment, that he had never felt, and never would feel, as mortified as he did just then.

She waited.

“Evans,” he got out pleadingly before he stopped, just short of stuffing his first into his mouth. He had no idea what he would have continued to say, and he also didn’t want to know.

“Tell me what you did,” she repeated. “Tell me what you felt.”

What he had felt?

Panic, then jealousy, and then steady, hot desire. And then guilt. Remorse. Shame. The pattern had then repeated, and repeated, every day since.

“I know what you’re doing,” he accused, speaking even as the realization hit him. For a moment, she looked surprised, but hid the fact quickly. “You’re trying to flip it. You’re embarrassed so you’re trying to embarrass me.”

Whatever response he expected, he didn’t expect her to laugh.

The laugh started out low at first, almost bitter, but she seemed to grow genuinely amused, if still angry, when she surveyed his face. He knew he must have looked stunned. “I mean, you’re right,” she agreed, and then laughed more, because her admission did nothing to lessen his shock. “I didn’t expect you to notice I was doing it, or to call me on it if you did. It would have been smarter for you not to, probably, and just take it on the chin.”

That actually made total sense, and he wished he had seen it that way.

“But, like you said…” She spread her hands apart, gesturing towards him, passing her judgment. “You’re impulsive.”

For a while, neither of them spoke.

“What good will it do? To embarrass me?” he finally asked, and from the look on her face, she knew she had him even before he did.

“It will make me feel better.”

He sighed. Well, fuck.

“And it might help me get over it faster.”

“You’re never going to get over this,” he said flatly. “You’re going to hate me for the rest of our lives.”

She shrugged, once again with that casual quality she seemed determined to pull back over herself. “Are you sure? And before you answer,” she continued quickly, even as he opened his mouth, “I want you to consider if you thought, before last week, that you’d see me shag someone in a classroom.” He flinched a bit to hear her put it so plainly, which she graciously ignored. “Because if you didn’t expect it, how do you know what I’m capable of, or how I’ll react to anything? _You don’t know me_ , Potter.” She paused, pressing her lips together expectantly, and looked almost eager to debate him because she knew she would win. “Did you think I’d respond to this conversation like this?”

“I truly didn’t think that far ahead.” She gave another brief, quiet laugh, as if his honesty amused her, if a bit grimly. And he hated how almost logical her line of reasoning sounded, although he wasn’t sure if he only followed her explanation because of his undeniably desperate need for her forgiveness. And if she couldn’t offer forgiveness entirely, he wanted to at least receive relief for some of his guilt. With that in mind, he pushed, “So you could maybe not hate me after this?”

She seemed to seriously consider the question. “I’m not thrilled with you, and I doubt I’m ever going to be,” she said, and something about her tone made him wonder if, despite his own dogged honesty, she spoke totally honestly for the first time in return. “But I also won’t harm you physically, magically or otherwise. And I won’t yell at you about it, and I’ll be perfectly cordial in classes and in prefect meetings.” It sounded like the basis for an agreement, and one not too shabby. “And I don’t think I’ll hate you, no. Is that important to you?”

He didn’t to bother deny it. “Yes.”

“Okay,” she said simply, unreadably, in return. “Go ahead then.” When he didn’t immediately respond, she waved a hand in exasperation. “I don’t get it. If you want me to be less embarrassed—”

“Ask me again.”

“Which part?” she asked practically. “Why you watched, or what you did?”

“I absolutely jerked off, Evans.” He immediately wished he hadn’t said her name at the end, because it somehow made his frank admission sound worse to his own ears. He felt faintly sick. “Is that what you want to hear?”

It wasn’t lost on him, after he said it, that the latter sentence unconsciously echoed Morton’s own words when she straddled his lap to torment him. But, James thought bitterly, Morton definitely had the better end of this bargain.

Morton, clever enough to create his own magic, and he, James, at least passingly smart, smart enough to become Head Boy.

How had Lily so clearly bested them both?

“Honestly? Yes.” He looked at her, surprised by her guilelessness, but had to quickly look away. He couldn’t meet her eyes. “But why did you watch?” she persisted. “You didn’t have to.”

His insides were on fire.

“Evans, show me a bloke our year—no, actually, any year—who wouldn’t watch two people shag.” Why did he keep saying her name?

“Okay, so you’d watch anyone, then,” she said, as if she believed that completely. He groaned. It felt like he kept digging himself into a deeper hole, and that she aided him a bit too joyfully in the task. “So, let’s say the girl you find least attractive in our year—I don’t want to name names, you pick someone—”

“You _know_ I fancy you.”

His back had begun to sweat.

“And is that why you watched?” she asked.

“I—listen,” he broke off sharply, feeling almost out of his head. “There was no way you were going to get naked and I wasn’t going to look. There isn’t a scenario I can think of where that would happen. If that makes me terrible—okay, I _know_ that makes me terrible,” he cut her off as she began to interrupt, and somehow, just the sight of her, standing there impassively, with her penetrating eyes and even crueler questions, added frustration to his feeling of utter humiliation. “I get what you’re trying to prove, okay? I get that it makes me terrible, and I felt bad about it then and I’ve felt bad about it ever since.”

“Have you really?”

“Yes.”

“But not enough to look away.”

“No.”

A tight fist of anger gripped his chest—although at her or at himself, he couldn’t say.

“Would you now?” she asked.

“What?”

“If you feel bad, you presumably wouldn’t do it again. But if you saw me with Morton now, a second time, and you could leave, would you?”

“I…would try. But I don’t know.” And he knew after he said it that it was the truth. No matter how guilty he had felt over the past few days, with that feeling also came the almost frantic desire to see her come again.

He didn’t offer up this information, and to his surprise, she didn’t push it.

Instead, she seemed to switch tactics. “Were you jealous?”

He absolutely had not expected that.

He finally looked at her, and found that he could look, because she didn’t appear to be reveling in his torture anymore. She just looked blatantly curious. “What?”

“Well, if you fancy me—”

“Oh, come _off_ it,” he said, and she almost seemed to smile at the return of his open frustration. “You don’t have to make me admit that again. Or even at all. I’ve not exactly been subtle.”

She did smile at that, although her face lost none of its dangerous quality. She reminded him again, unwillingly, of the way that she’d looked that night with Morton, of the sheer satisfaction that came over her when she’d felt totally in control. He tried desperately to disconnect the current look from any memory of that night, worried she’d somehow figure out what he thought about—or, as a familiar flash of arousal crossed his stomach, that his body would give him away. He pushed the sudden shot of desire as deep down as possible.

“True,” she agreed, dragging him back to the moment at hand. “But if you were so jealous—”

“Of course I was.”

“—then how did you—”

He interrupted her before she could say “jerk off,” frightened of the very real possibility that it might add to his difficultly-suppressed craving to reach out and touch her. “After a while, I didn’t even notice him,” he said, and she gave a quiet, disbelieving _tsk_. “No, seriously. Almost immediately, all I could look at was you.”

It sounded so gentle, tender in a way that he felt but had not intended to express. He almost wanted to say something crass to ruin it, like that the moment had come over him the second Morton had flipped up her skirt to reveal her lack of knickers. But it hadn’t started there, not really. It had started in simply seeing the flex of her leg, and had continued not entirely because she’d taken off her clothes, but in no small part because of the faces and the sounds she had made throughout. And he hated knowing that he probably wouldn’t have felt the same if he had watched any other girl.

And knowing that, and knowing she probably heard that quiet ache in his voice, left him feeling utterly exposed in a way that nothing else had before.

It made him angry. He prepared to snap back at whatever she asked him next, no matter what it was. But she didn’t ask him another question. “I’m going to go to the common room,” she said, and he saw that her face had changed somehow, but he couldn’t read how. “I’ll see—”

“Wait, that’s it?”

“Do you really want me to ask you about it more?”

He had no idea what he wanted, and felt suddenly too exhausted to stay mad. He waved a hand and pulled his glasses off, and began rubbing the bridge of his nose, which somehow felt as tense as every other part of his body. He stayed that way a long time, long enough that he assumed she had silently left, and was surprised to find her still there when he put his glasses back on.

“Do you like this?” he asked after a still longer stretch of silence.

“Like what?”

He gestured to himself, aware that there was no hiding how tense and sweaty he looked. “Do you like knowing that I feel this way?” He didn’t bother specifying what way that was, because he wasn’t sure how to put it into words himself.

She seemed to honestly think about it. “A little, yeah. It does make me feel better knowing that you’re now terribly embarrassed and miserable too. It feels a little more even. Not entirely even—I don’t think that’s possible—but a little.” She paused. “And now I know that you won’t tell anyone what you saw, because I will tell everyone about _all_ of this.”

Despite this duplicitous, underhanded, and almost Slytherin line of thought, James almost had to admire her guile. “I haven’t told anyone, and I won’t.”

“Not even your mates?” She made it sound like a question, although it clearly doubled as a threat.

“No.”

“Not even Black?”

“No.” That seemed to satisfy her, at least a little. “And I won’t tell anyone that you’re dating Morton,” he added.

For maybe the first time since they’d entered the passageway, she looked totally surprised, and gave no attempt to hide it. “What? Oh—we’re not, though. Not dating, that is.”

He stared. “You’re not?”

She seemed to study his own surprise with more of her own, as if she hadn’t considered that he might have jumped to this assumption, and getting caught off guard flustered her. “No. I mean—yeah, we’ve talked about it in the past, but, it’s not— _I’m_ not…” She paused, and then shook her head, as through she remembered who she spoke to. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t need to explain this.” She didn’t bother adding the unspoken _to you_ to the end of the sentence. “But we’re not dating. We’re just…”

“Friends?” he interjected before he could stop himself. “Sure. In that case, sign me up. _I’ll_ be your friend.”

As soon as he said it, it hit him that he probably shouldn’t joke about those things yet, if ever. But she actually gave a slight laugh, and when she shot back, “I know you would,” the fact that she had any jest in her voice at all lightened some of the weight from his chest just a fraction. Yet some of the mirth faded from her face as she added shrewdly, “But just because you know that he and I are…whatever, that also doesn’t mean you can, I don’t know, make him throw up everywhere for weeks.”

Wait. “You knew about Gimble?” he asked uncertainly.

Satisfaction crossed her face. “I wasn’t completely sure, but you just confirmed it. I always assumed it was you. I didn’t know who else would do it, and, like you said, you’re not exactly subtle.”

He felt, for the first time in two years, kind of bad that he’d punished Greg for dating her, although he fully recognized that the feeling stemmed from getting caught rather than from genuine remorse. “Is that…why you broke up?”

“What? No, but—I don’t have to explain that to you, either! Christ, Potter, just because you saw me naked doesn’t mean you get to know everything about my love life—and don’t look like that! You’re lucky I can almost joke about it!”

He knew that, but he also didn’t want to explain that he hadn’t looked away from her out of embarrassment at her comment, but because she had absolutely confirmed that he liked hearing her talk about herself even remotely sexually far too much.

He felt very fortunate that he hadn’t allowed her to say ‘jerk off.’

The passageway suddenly felt inadequately small, but in a very different way than when he had considered his escape earlier to avoid the entire conversation. He didn’t want her to know that he felt uncomfortable, because that might end with her needling him more, pressing to know why he felt that way, just to antagonize him further. But his mind wouldn’t cooperate with his frantic need to cover his silence; he couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Uh—”

“I’m leaving,” she interrupted, and for that he felt tremendously grateful—but also somehow, in a sick way, disappointed. “I’ll see you upstairs.” She sounded so convincingly nonchalant that he might have thought she had gotten over their conversation completely, if not for the dark, warning look she shot him as she began to climb towards the seventh floor. “Don’t follow me. Wait a bit. And—”

“We never had this conversation?”

She nearly smiled, a look he caught only fleetingly before she disappeared up the stairs. “Sure, Potter. I won’t forget it, though,” she called down after her, leaving him utterly uncertain how to interpret her statement, let alone how to formulate a response.

Somehow, he felt left with more questions than answers, and like he had solved absolutely nothing,only probably made them worse.


	3. Chapter 3

As October faded into November, despite (or perhaps because of?) his conversation with Lily, James found himself constantly on the lookout for any interaction between her and Morton.

James watched them in Potions, where, in the days after he had spied Lily and Morton together, he realized that they always sat at the same table. They shared the space with Marlene McKinnon, one of her dorm mates, and also Lucas Rooney, the Ravenclaw Lily had mentioned offhandedly in conversation to Morton that night. (Why couldn’t he forget anything about that night, even a detail as small as that?)

On the day after he and Lily spoke, James arrived to class early, followed closely by Sirius, the only other Marauder who had stuck with the subject after OWLs. He sat at the table next to Lily’s, ignoring Sirius’ inquiries as to why they had abruptly moved the closest to the front that they had ever sat in any class. James had already determinedly decided that he would not look up when she entered the room, a promise which gave way the second he heard her voice. She seemed to notice his change in seats immediately, and she caught his eye as she set her things down. Her eyebrow quirked (in what? Irritation? Amusement? Simple greeting?), and he hurriedly looked away, embarrassed at getting caught. He swore not to look at her again during the lesson. He would only listen to hear any potential conversation.

He failed at that promise immediately, too. He found himself almost growing used to failure these days, at least when it came to her.

Over the silvery mist of his Skele-Gro potion (which gave off the correctly colored fumes, somehow, even if his potion itself was a deep burgundy instead of a pale green), James watched as Lily demonstrated to her table how to properly dissect and cut their flobberworms—halved first, to harvest some of the mucus, and then finely diced, rather than quartered, as the textbook instructed. At one point, she placed her hand over Morton’s hand—not Marlene’s or Rooney’s, James couldn’t help but notice—to demonstrate the necessary angle to draw his silver knife along the flobberworm’s skin to extract the most mucus, explaining her motions as she went along. Marlene and Rooney watched closely and mimicked her movements at their own stations. Morton smiled and thanked her politely, but that was it. Hardly the stuff of romance, James thought contemptuously as he watched their hands part, a fine thread of flobberworm mucus stretching between them.

“Mate,” Sirius said easily from his side. “Your cauldron is on fire.”

He never finished his Skele-Gro potion.

**xxx**

James watched them in prefect meetings, which, as Head Boy and Girl, he and Lily convened weekly in the Transfiguration classroom, as McGonagall had given them express permission to use the room for that purpose—and _only_ that purpose, she had added with a dark look at James, clearly anticipating that if given an inch, he might take a mile. To his surprise, in the meeting that followed his conversation with Lily, James found that he no longer had the capacity to feel uncomfortable in during meetings, at least not in the way he had all year. The growing pains inflicted from his leap as a regular student to Head Boy no longer weighed on his mind, and he no longer felt out of his depth in the role. No, instead he spent only what was needed of his attention to punctuate Lily’s instructions, remarks, and replies. Once or twice he thought he caught her looking at him after one of his comments, an expression on her face that almost seemed impressed. And more times than that, even, she complimented one of his ideas, a steady pattern that had begun in earlier meetings before their heated conversation, but one he had not expected to continue after. She stuck to her promise to continue to treat him cordially, and he doubted any of the prefects knew that something had passed between them. He hoped she remained just as oblivious to the fact that, despite his seemingly careful attention, he devoted most of his energy each meeting towards watching to see if she interacted with Morton any more frequently than she did the other prefects.

To his surprise, she did not. In fact, she seemed friendlier with Ravenclaw’s female seventh-year prefect, Marguerite Bennett, than she did Morton, whom she treated with like a causal acquaintance. Each week she handed out the patrol schedule, which she had always made without consulting James. (He had always accepted this without question, and only realized after overhearing her conversation about patrol with Morton that he was probably meant to share this burden with her. But how could he go about offering his help at that point?) And each week she assigned herself to split patrol with a different prefect—usually Bennett, but sometimes one of the other Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff prefects, although never the Slytherins. (And, for that, James didn’t blame her.)

Only twice in the weeks that followed did James spy Morton’s name besides Lily’s on the list of assignments for nighttime patrol. On those nights, no matter how hard he tried to fight it, James found himself shut behind the hangings of his four-poster bed with his wand lit and the Marauder’s Map spread open as Sirius, Remus, and Peter snored around him. James watched, for far longer than he cared to admit, waiting for the moment the tiny dots labeled “Lily Evans” and “Alexander Morton” would converge together somewhere suspicious—not, say, in the Great Hall or a public corridor, but somewhere deserted and secluded, perhaps back in the classroom on the fourth floor where he had spied them initially.

But both nights, that moment never came. In the morning, sporting a clearer head and a guilty conscience, and with the Marauder’s Map wiped clean and tucked back into his bedside drawer, he had to ask himself what he would have done if he had watched them meet up on the map. Would he have wiped the map clean so he didn’t have to look? Would he have stayed there in the darkness, watching the labels of their name cover one another as the dots overlapped? Or would he have thrown on his invisibility cloak and hurried through the dark corridors to…to do what?

**xxx**

He found his answer one unseasonably chilly night in mid-November. As time went on, he found himself increasingly reaching for the Marauder’s Map on nights that he couldn’t sleep, regardless as to which prefects covered duty. He managed to ignore, but never quite silence, the nagging feeling of guilt that went along with it, but found a relatively easy way to justify his form of spying. If he didn’t check the map, he reasoned, he would just lay awake and wonder. No, it was far better for him to just take a quick peak to give him some relief, he told himself. (He never did quite decide if he believed his own logic.)

After many checks without any alarm, the motion began to feel almost mechanical, a simple act of ritual before he went to sleep. Then came the night he finally saw what he had been looking for: Lily’s name alongside Morton’s, neither label fully legible as the script melded into one another, both dots shut inside the spare classroom on the fourth floor. His heart jumped into his mouth; he felt as if he’d just dropped twenty feet on a broomstick. He had slipped out of his bed and opened his trunk, fingers clutched around the invisibility cloak, before his mind caught up with his body. _What was he doing?_ But he banished that thought, so easily in his adrenaline-filled state that it felt as if he had never stopped to question himself, and he stole out of the room soundlessly before his movement woke up Remus, who slept notoriously lightly.

He was midway down the seventh-floor corridor before he realized that he hadn’t stopped to put on shoes or even shove his feet into slippers. By then the Fat Lady, unable to see his form under the invisibility cloak, had already cried out, “Who’s there?!” and he knew he couldn’t go back even if his feet would have allowed him to. They kept moving by instinct alone, even as his brain seemed to have stopped processing anything past the dull white noise that flooded his ears. By the time he’d reached the passageway he’d shown Lily weeks before, the icy floor had rendered his pinky toes numb, and the chill continued to encroach inwards along his feet. The next morning, still feeling, he would realize that he should have cast a warming charm on his feet the moment he’d slipped behind the wall and entered the same secret stairwell. But in the moment, the thought never occurred to him. He hardly even slowed to wordlessly conjure _Lumos_ from the tip of his wand, and didn’t bother pausing at the top of the spiral staircase to allow his eyes to adjust to the brilliant stream of light that materialized.

It was warmer inside the passageway, probably, he reckoned in the far-distant corner of his mind that still operated, because the body of the castle kept the hidden staircase widely protected from the night’s harsh wind. The same distant corner wondered, so loudly it felt like a scream, who was on patrol that night. The patrol schedule, copied out in Lily’s careful cursive script, seemed to swim before his eyes. She had assigned Morton to patrol the fop four levels of the castle, if his memory served, with Idony Wharton, a Slytherin prefect, covering the dungeons to the first three floors

For a moment, as James cast _Nox_ and pushed inwards on the unlit wall sconce on the fourth floor of the passageway, it seemed strange to him that Lily would risk getting caught on a nighttime stroll when she wasn’t on duty. The wall seem to try his patience by opening even slower than usual, but finally split wide enough to allow him to duck under the opening. He squeezed the joint at the elbow of the suit of armor as he took off down the corridor, not bothering to stop and see if the passage closed behind him, although he assumed it had. But, on second thought, the more he thought about it, the more her move hardly seemed like a risk. Few professors would question a prefect outside of their common room after hours, he realized, even if they weren’t on that night’s rotation. (Abruptly, it hit him—were professors even aware of the patrol schedule that he and Lily—truthfully, Lily—set, or were they just expected to wave on any student with a silver “P” pinned to their robes? Was anyone holding them accountable?) And even if a professor might doubt a prefect, none, surely, would question the Head Girl for patrolling the corridors after hours, especially when that Head Girl was as trustworthy, dependable, and honest as Lily Evans. Yes, it made sense that Lily could leave the seventh-floor common room, secure in the knowledge that Morton was meant to patrol the top floors, which made talking her way past any lurking professors her only obstacle. After that, it had to be as simple as meeting Morton when he could easily slip away from his patrol. He could always claim he had been patrolling a different area if professors caught rule-breakers somewhere within his requisite four floors.

The fact that he worked all of this out—whether he was right or wrong—left James feeling undeniably foolish, almost embarrassed by thoughts he hadn’t shared aloud.

How had he gotten so obsessed?

He slowed down as he approached the classroom, his breath burning in his throat, and all but crept forward, hugging the wall for the last forty paces despite seeing no other movement in the halls—even the portraits were asleep in or missing from their frames. With slow, steady movements, he pulled the Marauder’s map from inside his robe pocket and unfolded it, the parchment thankfully too worn to let out so much as crinkle. He had folded it up inside the deserted common room so that the map of the fourth floor faced outwards, and he scanned the area, squinting in the flickering torchlight that filtered through his invisibility cloak, to check if Lily and Morton were still just on the other side of the door.

They were.

He waited.

He didn’t even know what he waited for. He couldn’t hear anything, as pressing his ear to the door’s crack and then keyhole quickly revealed. He didn’t dare try the door, although that hardly mattered, because he knew Morton would have locked it. And he wasn’t sure that he wanted to see what was going on inside the classroom anyway, although he also wasn’t sure he _didn’t_ want to see it. His shoulders cramped as he stood motionless, knees bent to keep his entire height concealed within the cloak. Time passed slowly, he was sure, but he had no timepiece and no way of knowing besides the steadily increasing pain from his cold feet.

Did Morton know that he knew? Had Lily told him about their conversation in the hidden stairwell? She could whisper it to him as they got undressed, the words meant to somehow torment him, something she clearly liked to do. _“Potter told me that he saw us shagging last month,”_ he imagined her saying, imagined so clearly that he could almost hear her laugh in his ear. Because if she had told him, they would laugh at him, he was certain. He tried to guess how Morton would respond. _“What a pervert. I’m sure he got off, because it’s the closest he’ll ever get to you.”_ James became aware, abruptly, that he couldn’t conjure Morton’s voice to mind like he could Lily’s. Outside of his unwitting spy session, had he ever really heard Morton talk outside of a classroom answer, a brief comment in a prefect meeting, or a hurried “good game” after a Quidditch match?

Sometime later (how much later James wasn’t sure, but long enough for the cold to spread up his calves and into his knees), the lock on the door gave way with a click as loud as a hex in the corridor’s silence. He had just enough time to take two additional steps back, giving the doorframe an even wider berth, before, in mere seconds, Morton had slipped out the door and closed it soundlessly behind him. He had that same look on his face that James recognized from the last time—a look of utter misbehavior, of sneakiness, of an attempt to pull one over on those around him. Even though James had seen the expression before, he thought the look still sat strangely on Morton’s features—perhaps even weirder because never, in the weeks of observing him with Lily, had James seen him wear it during daytime hours. It seemed an expression entirely reserved for these late-night meetups.

James also couldn’t recall ever seeing Morton’s hair in quite this state of disarray, and the sight of it made his chest tighten forcefully. Just from watching the Marauders Map, James knew they had definitely not met up to exchange Charms notes. But the way Morton’s fringe stuck upwards and the matching patterns of twisted locks above both of his ears somehow drove home that they’d shagged in a way that observing dots on a parchment could not. And somehow, he found he almost hated to see the aftermath rather than the deed itself. Observing Morton, James could only imagine the acts that he and Lily had committed, and had to wonder if the scenarios that raced through his mind were better or worse than what they had actually done.

Most of all, fighting down the heated flush of arousal in his stomach at the images of Lily he could only all too easily conjure to mind, James hated how much he wished he could have seen her again, no matter how guilty it made him feel.

But Morton didn’t give James much time to dwell. Seemingly oblivious to the state of his hair or the look on his face, he gave a perfunctory sweeping glance up and down the corridor and then took off at a measured pace towards the Grand Staircase, presumably to continue his patrol as if he had never stopped.

The minutes slipped by, perhaps five but certainly no more than seven, before the door opened once more and Lily exited the classroom. Unlike Morton, she appeared entirely put together, from every piece of hair smoothed neatly behind both ears to the careful tuck of her shirt. Also unlike Morton, she immediately drew her want to cast _Lumos_. Even feeling as he did—like his chest matched the cold, unfeeling state of his feet—James couldn’t help but smile just a little. The act, paired with her signature flawless posture, seemed to announce to the corridor—to the castle—that she was out and about from her bed after hours, and as Head Girl she had every right to be, no rule breaking here, thank you very much. It was a ballsy move, entirely Gryffindor.

She turned the opposite way from Morton, away from the Grand Staircase, and instead traced the same path that James had taken from the secret passage. Moving automatically, James followed her, although he grimly recognized that there was little else he could do in that moment. After all, what was he supposed to do since Lily and Morton had parted ways?

And beyond that, why, _why_ had he even left his dormitory?

Lily’s walked unhurried, assuredly unbothered as she strolled up the fourth-floor corridor. It wasn’t the first time that James had watched her patrol the hallways, which was unsurprising given how often she had been on duty since becoming a prefect, and the amount of times he and the other Marauders had sneaked out of Gryffindor tower after hours. He and his friends often checked the Marauders Map before they left their dormitory to plan the route of their nighttime prowls around any prefects or professors, although of course even their best laid plans often went awry. He had never once minded when it meant that they came across Lily on duty—although he had, of course, resented the accompanying stifled sniggers of whoever had joined him under the cloak, as even Remus wasn’t always immune to laughing at the expression on James’ face when he saw her. She always scoured the area around her more efficiently than other prefects, sweeping her wand methodically left to right, which made her a more formidable adversary in the dark, twisting corridors. Even then, knowing the cloak protected him from her keen eyesight, James still melted back into the shadows of a particularly large tapestry when she came to a sudden halt, wand raised evenly to her shoulder and gaze planted firmly on the wall.

Even from profile, he could read the expression on her face as one of utter shock. Too interested to listen to his better judgment, he slipped soundlessly further up the corridor, to just across the hall from where she stood. His brain immediately exploded into a shower of expletives.

The wall to the secret passageway had not closed behind him. It stood silently open, like a dark, gaping mouth.

Lily turned abruptly, although not to look further down the corridor, where she hadn’t yet passed and where unknown rule-breakers most potentially lurked. Instead, she stared back down the path she had just taken, and behind the brilliant glare of her wand, James could see her lips pressed together in a fine, even line. He bent his knees to crouch even further and felt the cloak’s hem pool around his ankles. He didn’t care. He wanted to make himself as small and invisible as possible.

After several long moments in which James knew her eyes must have passed over and through him at least two or three times, she lowered her wand to hip-level. She turned to check the corridor the other way, but without nearly as much tension in her body as before. James took the opportunity to press his back flat against the wall across behind her, desperate for any sort of stability from the cold stone. She seemed to quickly write off whatever she looked for on that side of the corridor, and turned around again, her mouth now twisted with thought but expression otherwise mild, as if she had merely encountered a challenging wrist movement in an advanced charm that she couldn’t quite get the hang of. Was she looking back at the classroom? James had to assume that she was, because what else was back there that she might be interested in?

Suddenly, she spoke. “Potter?”

Even though his name came out at just above a whisper, her voice—the first he’d heard since the Fat Lady’s shrieks on the seventh floor—startled James so much that he almost fell over on his unsteady, frozen feet. Only after he’d righted himself, pushing his back even more firmly against the wall, did it occur to him not just that she’d spoken, but what she’d said. She had said _his name_ , and that meant she must have—

But no. She couldn’t have seen him. And in the brief seconds after his name left her lips, even as his mouth filled with the bitter taste of sheer, fear-based adrenaline, his brain recognized two important things. First, she didn’t even look in his direction. And second, his name had come out as more of a question than an accusation, and without an ounce of the rage he expected would have filled her voice at the sight of him.

She stood silent for several long seconds, her brows now knitted together as she looked from the open passageway, down the hall towards the classroom, and then back again several times. Finally, she sighed, breathing almost unintelligibly, “Fucking hell.” And then she slipped into the passageway, and the next moment, the wall slowly drew together until the stone left no visible sign that it had ever split apart.

For a while James kept absolutely still, his heart still pounding in his ears. Eventually, he drew himself up and ventured back up the corridor from whence he’d came, tracing Morton’s footsteps towards the Grand Staircase. Even though his knees and back had joined the pained protest of his feet, he knew he couldn’t return to the common room anytime soon for fear that he’d find her there, seated in a high-backed chair and waiting for him, ready to throw all manner of hexes his way once he’d crawled out of the portrait hole and confirmed her suspicions that he’d followed her.

No. He’d wait, even if it took hours for him to feel certain that she’d gone to sleep. Even as his warm bed beckoned (and as his adrenaline subsided, replaced with the familiar, leaden feeling of guilt), he crept downstairs to pass his time in the warmth of the kitchen instead.

**xxx**

Four nights later, James watched them as Lily and Morton sat two spaces apart at a dinner party held in Slughorn’s office. Marlene McKinnon and Lucas Rooney sat between them on the long table, Marlene to Lily’s right and Rooney to Morton’s left, forming the short line of their little Potions table quartet. (Were Marlene and Rooney dating? James had never noticed before, but, from the way that Marlene looked at him, and vice versa, he would bet a good portion of his Gringots vault that either they were or would be soon.) From James’ vantage point—seated not only across from the group, but also several seats further down the table—he couldn’t make out what they spoke of, although he did note that Lily and Morton never exchanged a private word. But how could they, with Marlene and Rooney between them?

Sirius sat at James’ side, easily talking Quidditch with Norman Tiller, the Hufflepuff Quidditch captain. James tried to jump into the conversation intermittently, just enough to draw cover over his (hopefully) unnoticeable surveillance. Fortunately, Sirius had perked up enough to carrying the burden of the conversation, so James didn’t have to say much.

Although they attended only infrequently, Slughorn regularly invited them to his “Slug Club” gatherings. He invited him, James assumed, because of his position as captain of the Gryffindor Quidditch team, and no small magical talent, although he felt certain that his new spot as Head Boy only added to Slughorn’s interest in him. And he invited Sirius probably due in part to his own academic gifts, but mainly simply on the valor of the Black name. Slughorn had always seemed eager to add Sirius to his “collection” of students with the most famous (or, more like, infamous) pureblood names, which had always left James feeling rather fortunate that his own pureblood family had little standing in the wizarding world. Of the Blacks, Slughorn had already “collected” Regulus, which was the main reason Sirius rarely made an appearance at Slughorn’s regular dinners and events—not that he ever admitted, even to his friends, that his brother had the power to keep him away from anything. No, he blamed the collective Slytherin group as a whole—who admittedly did make up the majority of the Slug Club—for his aversion to the gatherings. “Why would I willingly spend a night around that right bunch of gits?” he would ask whenever an invitation came, never mentioning Regulus by name. He rarely ever did.

That night, it had taken James his most charming cajoling to convince Sirius to attend the dinner with him.

“There will be food,” he had promised winningly hours before the party.

Sirius had waved an impatient hand. “There’s food in the kitchens.”

“If we go, Slughorn will for sure invite us to his Christmas party. We’ll look well stupid if we’re not invited.”

Peter had coughed pointedly, although Remus hadn’t even bothered to look up from his book. Peter and Remus, far beyond Slughorn’s radar, had never once received an invitation to any of his gatherings, large or small.

Sirius had laughed at that, patting Peter’s back amiably. “You’re right there, Prongs,” he had joked. “We don’t want to be stuck here with this sorry lot.”

“And,” James had pushed further, aware of his headway, even if Sirius had spoken in jest, “We need to have some professorial allies. Think about it. If all the professors are as suspicious of as us McGonagall, we’ll never get anything done. It’s important we keep on the good side of some of them. Slughorn’s an easy mark. C’mon, Padfoot. It’s for the good of all Marauders, not just us.”

Sirius had still looked unconvinced, but no longer resolutely so. “I suppose.” He had cocked his head, looking not unlike the curious dog he transformed into on full moons. “Why do you want to go so bad? You usually don’t care.”

James had weighed his options. He could have lied, creating some nonsense on the spot about Slughorn’s connections to the Ministry and his owns desires to train as an Auror after graduation, all true, but not _the_ truth. He’d figured Sirius would see through it right away.

“I want to talk to Evans,” he had finally admitted. “She’ll be there. And I don’t want to go alone. So come with me.” It was close enough to the truth that he knew Sirius would believe him, even if James truly intended to watch Lily rather than talk to her.

“Oh, sure then,” Sirius had agreed easily, no questions asked. “Why didn’t you say so? Yeah, we’ll go. But seriously, Prongs, you don’t see her enough at your little Head Boy meetings?”

“No.” Also true.

“What’s the point in being Head Boy then?”

Sometimes James asked himself the same question.

When they had first arrived to Slughorn’s office, Sirius had taken a single look around the room and given James a withering look that promised that he very much owed Sirius a giant favor. James, too, had suddenly regretted his plan of action. They hadn’t attended a Slug Club gathering since sixth year, and he had honestly forgotten how tedious they could be. Slughorn had transformed his office into a miniature version of the Great Hall, although featuring only one long table rather than four. Some sort of sweet, spicy herbs burned in the fireplace, the warmth of which left the room feeling uncomfortably close. The only other light came from candles floating overhead, and those set in golden candelabras along the table, which bathed the room in the kind of dim, romantic light not dissimilar to Madam Puttifoot’s. It made for an intimate setting, but one full of people—including a large cluster of Slytherins—that James had no intention of getting cozy with.

For what felt like the millionth time in recent weeks, he wondered how on earth he had ended up where he was. That feeling of uncertainty had begun to feel more and more regular, more ordinary than the confidence he had had entering seventh year, which came upon him only fleetingly in recent days.

At least Slughorn had seemed delighted at their attendance, even if neither James nor Sirius could muster much enthusiasm in return. “Potter, my boy!” Slughorn had exclaimed, reaching to jovially shake James’ hand as if he hadn’t seen him in weeks, maybe months, even though they had just had Potions earlier that week. “And Black too, how good of you both to come! I can’t remember the last time we’ve had the honor of your presence at one of these little gatherings—but no, no, don’t worry about it in the least!” he had insisted as James had opened his mouth to offer some excuse that he still hadn’t worked out in his brain. “I don’t blame you a bit. You’ve got quite a lot on your plates, with Head Boy duties for you, Potter, and Quidditch for the both of you. No, I don’t hold your absence against you in the least. But I will hold it against you if you beat Slytherin next weekend, make no mistake about that!” He had tiped them exaggerated wink. “Now, take a seat anywhere, anywhere you’d like. We’ll all dine together here, no house divisions tonight!”

Sirius had snorted, but quickly took to coughing to cover it up. Despite the single table, house divisions had already made themselves remarkably clear, with Slytherin students clustered around Slughorn’s chair at the head of the table. Students from the other three houses tended to sit amongst themselves as well, although Ravenclaw boasted only three attendees, Hufflepuff two, and Gryffindor the four of James, Sirius, Marlene, and Lily. Slytherin’s numbers almost matched the other three houses combined. It made, James thought, for rather unpleasant dinner company.

Sirius had pulled a face upon first spying Regulus, who sat beside Severus Snape, which only doubled his displeasure. He’d determinedly gone for the opposite end of the table, as far from them and the Slytherins as possible. His mood had been sour for the first ten minutes or so as he ordered food into his empty gold plate. His knife cuts on his magically-delivered steak had seemed overly violent at first, but the mood had disappeared readily enough, as James assumed that it would. Sirius was naturally too high-spirited to ever stay angry for long.

Still, after an altogether fine meal, Sirius’ irritation seemed to creep back in as Slughorn tried to engage the entire table in conversation, inquiring after specific seventh year students’ graduation plans over a fine display of dessert options. It came off as more of a friendly interrogation than an actual conversation, although Slughorn clearly expected everyone at the table to listen or, if not fully pay attention, at least remain quiet enough so that he could engage students far away from his seat. James elbowed Sirius sharply as he sighed audibly when, at Slughorn’s prompting, Lucas Rooney’s launched into his detailed plans necessary to enter the Healing profession. James shared none of Sirius’ irritation. Truly, he felt pleasantly surprised that Slughorn had waited until after their entrees to monopolize the conversation.

“Well, Healing is a difficult profession, my boy,” Slughorn said, helping himself a second slice of apple pie after Rooney finished his long recital of preparations for the Healing school exam. “And so much of it revolves around Potions. You’re a competent brewer, certainly, but I will warn you that you may find yourself facing potions in the entrance exam that are beyond your skill level—oh, current skill level, no doubt,” he added quickly after a glance at the way Rooney’s face reddened. “You can get there, it’ll just take some time.”

James watched as Marlene’s arm extended discreetly towards Rooney under the table to presumably take his hand. Yes, he decided, they were definitely dating. Was that how Lily and Morton had initially met and become…whatever they were? _Friends_ , as she said?

“One of my old students works at St. Mungo’s in the muggle ward. He takes care of all those muggles who come in with magical injuries, fixes them up, sets their memories right, all that. I can put you in contact, if you like. I’m sure he’d have some insight into the profession.” Before Rooney could even open his mouth to respond with thanks, Slughorn barreled on. “But if you want real, practical help, Rooney, I’d ask Severus here, or Lily. Best set of potion-makers this year—or that I’ve had in many years, truthfully.”

It didn’t escape James’ notice that Slughorn referred to the two by their first names rather than surnames. He had always unashamedly favored them both.

“Why, Lily, you could tutor Rooney a bit, get him up to snuff on some of the more complex healing potions, couldn’t you? Your Skele-Gro potion was first-rate, truly extraordinary for a first try.” Slughorn didn’t even suggest Snape, who seemed to glower more than ever behind the curtain of his hair, although James suspected it was more that his own Skele-Gro potion had gone unnoticed than the fact that Slughorn hadn’t offered him up as help.

“If you’d like, Rooney, sure,” Lily replied easily, as if totally unbothered by the singularized praise, although James couldn’t help but notice the way her collarbone flushed even as her face stayed impassive.

“Yes, I expect you’d make a top-notch Healer, Lily,” Slughorn went on thoughtfully. Lily had already set down her dessert spoon at the first mention of her name, as if she expected him to continue to single her out. “Although I’m sure you’d excel at any profession—I can’t really think of one where your skills wouldn’t translate well, although of course I hope you’ll continue to brew. You’ve got a natural talent.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Even from the other side of the table, James heard more than one of the Slytherins make a derisive sound, a snort or a scoff or pointed cough. He saw the Slytherin Quidditch Captain, Lucinda Talkalot, whisper something to Regulus that definitely included the word “mudblood,” the slur unmistakably readable on her lips, although James sat too far away to hear her.

If Slughorn noticed, he didn’t comment. “Have you given any more thought, Lily, about what you’d like to do after this year?” he persisted. “You’ll have the NEWTs for just about anything, I imagine.”

“Some. I had planned on Curse-Breaking for a while. But I’ve been thinking more and more seriously about becoming an Auror, professor.”

Slughorn’s eyebrows shot up. “An Auror? Really now?”

Lily folded her hands demurely across her lap, although her expression was anything but as she looked squarely at each of the Slytherin students surrounding Slughorn, none of whom tried to hide their visible distaste for her. Her gaze lingered on Snape the longest, who, from James’ vantage, didn’t quite meet her eyes. “You must have noticed that the _Prophet_ reports more mysterious happenings everyday—witches and wizards gone missing, some of whom turn up dead; increasing violence against muggles; rising reports of Unforgiveable Curses performed on magical and non-magical alike. And we can’t forget about Diagon Alley, even if the _Prophet_ stopped reporting on it right away. There’s something going on over on the Continent too. There’s reports of giant uprising and increased vampire activity in France, and of dark creatures generally attacking humans in larger numbers than the last few years. It seems…” She chewed on her words slowly, a change of pace from her previous brisk, firm tone that had brought color to her cheeks. “It seems like something is happening, that things are changing, and in a way that will soon require greater resources and more active participation against the Dark Arts. The Ministry will need more Aurors.”

The table had fallen completely silent, without so much as the scraping of utensils against plates. At Sirius’ side, Hufflepuff Norman Tiller stared motionless at Lily, his mouth slightly ajar, half-eaten creampuff forgotten in one hand. Anyone who read the _Prophet_ noticed those things, of course. James and his friends had even spoken about them privately in their dormitory, with Sirius expressing particular anger at the rise in dark activity, certain that if his relatives weren’t involved, they would join soon. But James had never heard anyone speak of the _Prophet’s_ reports publically before.

“As if you couldn’t like her more…” Sirius whispered to James under his breath, although even he sounded grudgingly pleased. The words had been entirely Gryffindor. It was impossible not to respect her for them.

At Slughorn’s side, Slytherin Walden Mulciber put a hand down on the table. He may not have done so with much force, but in the stunned silence, it went off like a Zonko’s firework. Nearly everyone jumped. “You don’t know what you—” he began, and the sheer acid in his voice had James suddenly, wildly wondering if Mulciber clutched his wand under the table, ready to pull it out in a moment’s notice.

James didn’t trust himself to hear what came next and not respond in kind. “You know, Evans,” he interjected, loudly enough to cut Mulciber off completely, and the table turned to face him, “I hear what you’re saying. It makes sense to me. But I don’t think you’re meant to be an Auror.”

It was the first time he had spoken to her, aside from rather formal conversation during prefect meetings, since he had pulled her into the secret passageway weeks before. She pressed her lips together, reminding James forcefully of the expression on her face only four nights prior when she had surveyed the fourth-floor corridor with suspicion. But instead of suspicion, she held her lips tightly to hide a smile. “Oh?”

James felt, rather than heard, Sirius’ surprise in the way that he shifted in his seat. He didn’t look away from Lily, but felt Sirius’ sharp, inquisitive look nonetheless. There had been a time that Lily would have never invited him to continue to speak. For years, she had cut off all of his attention with a sharp, “Sod off,” or the occasionally stronger, “Go fuck yourself.” Her single syllable truly was a break from the usual script, something unseen by anyone who didn’t attend prefect meetings, where she seemed to openly value his opinion. Did anyone else notice? Marlene, maybe. Her dark eyes shifted from James’ face to look at Lily curiously, although she may have simply wondered what her friend would say next.

“Yeah. Have you thought about becoming a Hit Wizard?” James asked, his voice still louder than necessary in case Mulciber felt like jumping back in. “I’ve seen you duel—no, I’ve _felt_ you duel, and you’re relentless. I’ll never forget when you got me with that skin-stretching hex last year. It took me ages to figure out how to undo it—even Madam Pomphrey couldn’t help. Did you make that up yourself?” James didn’t add mention of the dark red hex she’d thrown his way in the secret passage weeks before, although it definitely came to mind. What had _that_ been? Instead, not waiting for her to answer, he turned to Sirius. “And she got you with the Conjunctivitis Curse once, didn’t she?”

“Fifth year,” Sirius replied cheerfully. “In March. I remember, because we had a Quidditch match against Ravenclaw the next day and we didn’t know how to get our hands on an Oculus potion. It was chaos. Whole team all panicked.”

Lily returned his cheeky smile. “In my defense, I did brew it for you.”

“After a bit, of course. Cheers, Evans.”

Some of the tension in the room dissipated. Mulciber’s mouth still worked furiously, but not to form words—he looked instead as if he chewed his tongue to keep quiet.

“I remember that,” Morton said suddenly.

Even as the overall strain in the room continued to decline, some of the warmth in James’ chest evaporated; although others had seemed to relax, his body now tightened. Four nights before, he couldn’t remember the sound of Morton’s voice. To hear him speak just then brought back all of the sheer loathing towards him that had piled up in James’ mind. It also, he realized hotly, uncomfortably, brought him back to the night he’d first seen Morton and Lily together, because he hadn’t heard Morton speak outside of a formal setting since. James was unwillingly struck with the memory of the way Lily’s face flushed with pleasure when Morton had told her he couldn’t stop thinking about her lack of knickers during the entirety of Potions. Morton’s voice had been lower when he’d said it, spawning from somewhere deeper in the back of his throat, but the sound was nearly the same and James hated it. He had never loathed someone more, he decided in that moment. Not even Snape.

“We lost that game pretty spectacularly,” Morton continued, and James found that he couldn’t look at him without clenching a fistful of his robes with his wand hand. He felt like Mulciber, unable to control his own emotions without the desire to send a curse across the table. He forced his arm to relax. With the chairs clustered so tightly around the table, he knew Sirius must have felt both the tension and the release. “I took a bludger to the face near the end. Did you hit it, Black?”

“Oh, probably,” Sirius said breezily. “Who’s to say? I’ll take the credit. How long did it take Pomphrey to fix your nose? Two minutes?”

“A bit longer,” Morton replied dryly. “She had trouble locating my bones to mend them, said I had been lucky that they hadn’t penetrated my brain, although she may have just been cross. You ought to have held onto that Oculus potion for a bit longer, Evans. We’d have had an advantage.”

“As a Gryffindor, you know I very well couldn’t,” Lily said, smiling, and even though James had attended the dinner expressly to monitor any interaction between the two, he couldn’t bring himself to look at the first of their comments addressed solely to each other.

By then Sirius had begun to laugh, and others around him soon joined in. Was it at the story, James wondered, or in relief that the tense moment had passed? Even Snape cracked a brief smile, although James reckoned, based on the look of abhorrence he shot at Sirius, that it was mainly at the thought of Sirius suffering at Lily’s hands.

Slughorn chortled the loudest. “As a professor, I can hardly condone this kind of behavior, so I will pretend I haven’t heard it.” He offered Lily a great wink. “I will say, though, before I forget this episode entirely, that I’m quite sure that Potter and Black deserved it.”

“Oh, undoubtedly,” Sirius agreed, and James nodded. They usually did deserve her wrath. He couldn’t remember what he had done or said to make her hit him with that skin-stretching hex, just the sheer horror at lifting up his still-pooling skin into his arms to make sure he didn’t trip over it as he rushed to the Hospital Wing. He had, he defended internally, tried to fix the hex himself before he’d gone for help. And he hadn’t told Madam Pomphrey who had hexed him, although she hadn’t exactly asked even when she couldn’t figure out the counter-curse. Like Slughorn, she had probably assumed he deserved it.

Sirius had apparently spoken up too many times to fly under Slughorn’s radar. The Potions Master eyed him with a frank, curious expression. “Black, what are your plans after Hogwarts?” He didn’t comment on any of Sirius’ abilities, probably because he didn’t know them well outside of Sirius’ the typical “E” he earned in Potions, or at least earned when he cared enough to pay attention.

“Oh, you know.” Sirius waved an expressive hand before picking up his spoon for another bite of bread pudding. “I might fix cars for the Ministry, write for _Witch Weekly_ , play Quidditch for the Arrows—I’ve thought about it all, really. We’ll see what happens. I don’t like to plan too much. What’s the point?”

James choked back a laugh at the look of disbelief on Slughorn’s face and busied himself with his own dessert. He was glad he’d brought Sirius.

**xxx**

Sometime later, stuffed full of food and wine (“But not too much, not too much!” Slughorn had routinely cautioned as he refilled students’ glasses, although his grin told a different tale), the party began to disband. Students trickled out in twos and threes, passing by an effusive Slughorn who had posted himself by the door, seemingly to allow him the time to extend ever-more advice over goodbyes.

Lily walked to James’ side without a trace of awkwardness, as if they had always operated on casual speaking terms in social settings. “Are you on duty tonight?” she asked, still nursing her glass of elderberry wine.

“No,” he answered with honest confusion. Why would she ask him that, when she herself had made the schedule?

“Hmm.” She took a sip of her wine. “I was certain…no, you’re right. Bennett’s on tonight, and I think Morton relieves Wharton shortly.”

Was she…taunting him? It felt pigheaded and arrogant to even consider. And yet…was it the candlelight that made her eyes glitter when she looked up at him, and the wine that caused the little half-smile on her lips?

Surely.

Marlene approached and touched Lily’s shoulder. “I’m taking off,” she said, and although she spoke in the singular, she nodded almost unconsciously behind her, to where Rooney and Morton stood still chatting by the table, evidently waiting for her. Rooney looked towards her at the sound of her voice, even though they stood a good thirty paces apart. Yes, definitely dating, James decided. Without a doubt.

“Okay. I’ll see you in the dormitory…soon, I expect.” Lily’s tone was knowing but easy, more relaxed than James had ever heard it. But when did he ever really hear her speak so casually before? He mainly heard her talk in classrooms or in prefect meetings, both which demanded a performative tone. And, well, the last time they had chatted at length, she had nearly hexed him severely, although he didn’t want to think about that conversation. The humiliation still burned. “Just don’t get caught by any prefects,” she added. “It’s after hours.” She gave Marlene a look that seemed positively mischievous, although before October James would have doubted her capacity for any sort of mischief or rule-breaking. After everything that had happened in the past weeks, he felt more certain than ever, as she herself had pointed out, that he really didn’t know what she was capable of.

He paid careful attention to the way that the expression changed her face—or didn’t. Did she look much different, teasing Marlene, than she had looked at him just a moment before? And—although he didn’t want to think about it, never did, but seemingly couldn’t stop—did that expression differ greatly from the way she looked when she had had one leg up on him or on Morton?

Marlene just laughed. “If I’m stopped, I’ll just tell them I room with the Head Girl. I’m sure they’ll leave me be.” She paused for a moment, her expression grew somber, and she lowered her voice. “But if I don’t see you until the morning, Lily, seriously, _well done_.” She did not specify on what. She didn’t need to. But she considered Sirius and James carefully, clearly mulling something over in her mind. Her eyes never lost the look that James had come to expect from her over the years, one which imparted a general sense of dislike, but she apparently decided to trust them enough, if just for the moment. “My mum’s an Auror,” she explained. “Lily’s right—there are things happening out there, past even what they report in the _Prophet._ It’s scary.”

“You-Know-Who, you mean,” Sirius clarified matter-of-factly. He cast his own swift glance around the room. James knew he looked for Regulus, but it appeared that he and the other Slytherins had already left.

“Yes.”

They didn’t have to specify who they were talking about, because they _did_ all know who. The _Prophet_ had once called Voldemort by his name two years back or so, if James remembered the timeline correctly. At first reporters hadn’t shied away from calling out the violent deeds that quickly became synonymous with his supporters, especially the attacks on muggleborn witches and wizards, and the even more brutal assaults on muggles. It had seemed, in the beginning, that Voldemort and his followers simply made up a fanatical fringe sect—a dangerous group, certainly, but one that the Ministry could nevertheless certainly bring to justice.

That had all changed two years prior in the spring of their fifth year with a searing attack on Diagon Alley, which Voldemort and his followers had never hit before. They had begun with an attack on the Gringot’s goblins, apparently just for fun, and then ransacked the first level of the bank entirely. They nearly obliterated the Leaky Cauldron, and blew out the front façade of the building, injuring several muggles and terrifying dozens more. They tortured witches and wizards in the narrow cobblestone streets, out in the open for all to see. They burnt down shops, paying particular attention to those owned by muggleborn witches and wizards, whom they killed immediately—although the detail of the victims’ lineage only became apparent later, after Ministry research, the status of a person’s bloodline obviously unclear without further digging. The Death Eaters, as Voldemort’s followers quickly became known, had clearly done their research and had chosen their targets purposefully.

Worse yet, at least for morale, the attack had occurred in broad daylight. Never before had they attacked magical people so wantonly, their previous attacks seemingly targeted at individuals who they quickly killed or coerced into joining their ranks in the secrecy of night. Even their attacks on muggles were isolated events, typically against a single family, and never took place in large villages, let alone in a city like London. The attack on Diagon Alley seemed a clear message, meant to alert the wizarding world to Voldemort’s power and hatred of any bloodline less than pure.

But after that, nothing. The Ministry investigated. Those who dared brave the wreckage of Diagon Alley saw Aurors poking around for weeks. But they made no arrests, and the whispers began. Did Voldemort have insiders in the Ministry who had derailed the investigation, or made the incident go away? How could all of this happen in the middle of a Saturday afternoon and no one could identify a single soul involved?

Even more ominously, since then, Voldemort and his followers hadn’t made another purposefully public attack. Still, the threat that they could never stopped lingering in anyone’s mind, just as they had probably intended.

The _Prophet_ quickly stopped any and all mention of Voldemort by name, and rarely printed any direct reference to his Death Eaters either. But anyone who cared to read between the newspaper’s lines could easily spy their handiwork in the untold number of violent incidences that had occurred around Britain ever since, which the _Prophet_ still covered without attributing their causes to any person or group. Most people, it seemed, hadn’t blamed the _Prophet_ for employing such a technique—after all, Death Eaters had targeted their headquarters in Diagon Alley with particular violence, torturing their staff and razing the entire building to the ground. More than anything, British witches and wizards seemed to take from the event a newfound, deeper fear of Voldemort—and a reluctance, like the _Daily Prophet_ , to say his name.

“Your uncle was there that day, wasn’t he?” Sirius asked Marlene after a few heavy moments of silence. “At Diagon Alley.”

Marlene nodded shortly. “Yes.” For a moment, James had no idea how Sirius would have remembered such a small detail, until Marlene, perhaps seeing his confusion, explained, “He was one of the editors at the _Prophet_ then. They tortured him.” She shook her head. “He doesn’t work there anymore.”

“Can’t blame him,” James muttered, remembering. It had been a huge story, never covered in the _Prophet_ , but talked about almost incessantly in the wizarding community—his own parents still discussed it at the dinner table when he’d returned home that summer. People worried that Ackerly McKinnon’s departure from the _Prophet_ might mean the installment of one of Voldemort’s lackeys into the editorship of the paper. Calder Catts, McKinnon’s previous co-editor, had taken over the position solely. Unlike McKinnon, who had shown himself as a vocal opponent of Voldemort from his work at the _Prophet_ , Catts’ loyalties remained a mystery.

That feeling of untrusting unease, of not knowing a person truly or who they supported, seemed to become more and more common as the days passed.

“It’s a war, truly,” Lily said, and her eyes blazed. “And someone will have to fight it.”

“Spoken like a true Gryffindor,” Sirius said, and he unknowingly echoing James’ earlier thoughts.

She shrugged. “And a muggleborn. They’re not likely to live and let live with me, are they?”

“Well truly, Evans—and I mean this seriously, no matter how it may come across or what my tone may suggest—anyone who comes on the other side of your Conjunctivitis Curse will immediately regret it.” Lily laughed, her prior determined expression melting away, and gave several sharps smacks to Sirius’ arm. He held up his hands to defend himself. “No, on my life! Did you know my eye hurt even after the Oculus potion healed it? I swear it did, for weeks. I might be permanently damaged.”

“I’m sure you are, although not due solely to me.”

“Lily, please don’t hurt him too badly,” Marlene said, and she, too, smiled as the mood immediately lifted. Sirius had a way of doing that, James thought. “Okay, I’m leaving. Behave yourself, Lily, or you’ll have to take points away from yourself. Or the Head Boy can take them away, I suppose,” she added as an afterthought.

“Truly doesn’t matter to me what she does to him,” James said.

“Spoken most _unlike_ a Gryffindor,” Marlene jested. She turned to leave, but stopped and turned back. “Oh, Lily. Alex said he had something to talk to you about, something about curfew or patrol.”

“Nothing to do with how you keep breaking it?” Lily asked cheekily.

“Funny. No, actual prefect and Head Girl stuff, sounds like. So don’t spend too much time damaging Black further. Alex said he’d wait.” She hesitated for one moment more, her body already turned to leave, but her eyes still taking in the sight of the three of them. “Besides,” she added bluntly, and her smiled faded to a look of confusion, perhaps tinged with dislike, “You have to admit that this is weird. Since when do we talk to them, Lily? Seriously.” And then she laughed, somewhat humorlessly, and walked away, her thick curls bouncing with each step.

“It _is_ a fair question,” Sirius said to Lily as they watched Marlene return to Rooney and squeeze his arm. Together, they left to say their goodbyes to Slughorn. “It’s been so long since we’ve talked that I didn’t know the pair of you could still string two words together, if I’m honest.”

“Charming, Black, really.” Lily’s eyes flitted briefly to Morton, and then she turned back to James and Sirius. “Did you ever consider that I just never wanted to waste my words on the two of you?”

“No. But that would mean that your words aren’t wasted now, if you’re talking to us, right?”

“I guess. It almost seems worth the effort to talk to you lot now that I understand that Potter is capable of actually listening and responding somewhat intelligibly, although the jury is still out on you, Black.”

James’ tongue felt too thick for his mouth, and he couldn’t shake the knowledge that Morton undoubtedly stared at them, waiting for Lily, even if he did do so politely and patiently. “Glad to hear my behavior in prefect meetings made such an impression on you,” he said, trying to keep his voice as light and carefree as hers. He felt fairly certain he succeeded.

“Oh.” She paused, finishing the rest of her wine. “Of course I meant your behavior in prefect meetings. What else could I mean? It’s not like we chat elsewhere, Potter.”

There. There! As she tipped her head to the side, surveying him, he saw on her face the exact same look she had given him when she wrested control over their conversation in the secret passage—eyes tilted up at the corners and mouth curled impishly even as she tried to keep her expression neutral.

_She was taunting him_.

And _enjoying it_.

The look vanished in a second, so quick James almost thought he had imagined it. “Anyway, I’m off.” She reached out to hand her glass to James, who, still utterly confused her behavior, took it automatically. “Be a dear and put that back for me, will you, Potter?” Without another word, she whirled about in a flurry of dark robes and left to join up with Morton, who, seeing her approach, met her at the door to say goodnight and goodbye to Slughorn.

“What the _fuck_ is going on?” Sirius asked immediately, intently, as he watched Morton and then Lily shake Slughorn’s hand. Slughorn acknowledged Morton only briefly before turning his full attention to Lily, just as Sirius turned his full attention to James.

James tore his eyes away from Lily’s smiling face. (Did she know he was watching her, dumbstruck? Why did he think that she probably did?) He looked at the glass in his hand, and finally to Sirius, who appeared every bit as shocked as he felt, only with considerably more mirth. “I’m very confused,” was the only way James knew how to reply.

“Yeah, you and me both, Prongs. Merlin, what even—” Words seemed to fail Sirius, even as he spoke each sentence with the sort of excitement that James knew he should have felt. “Are you two—I mean, you’re what, friends now? Is that what I just saw?”

“I…maybe.”

“So, what, you’ve been hitting it off with her in meetings since September, and then coming back to the common room and acting like, ‘Oh, being Head Boy is so dull,’ and, ‘Oh, I hate that I have to patrol at night, it takes all the fun away from sneaking out,’ and, ‘Oh, I—’”

“No?”

“You don’t even sound sure about that yourself, mate.”

James ran a hand over his face. The gesture somehow made him feel a little more solid, as though he could feel that he was, indeed, physically rooted to this spot. “I’m not.” He turned the glass in his hand. “Why did she give me this?”

“She’s fucking with you, Prongs. Could you not see that all over her face? After all the stunts we’ve pulled, you can’t recognize in someone else when they’re trying to mess with you?”

James walked slowly to the dining table and set Lily’s glass down. The remnants of dessert still lingered on the golden plates. It felt strangely like long time had passed since he had finished his bread pudding. “Yeah.” The realization of it hit him, again, firmly in the chest. She had been friendly, playful, even flirtatious, maybe, in the tone of her voice and the look she had given him and the words she had spoken. Truly, it wasn’t what she had said, but how she’d said it.

But what _had_ she said?

She’d acknowledged their tense conversation in the secret passage hideaway. He had assumed she would never speak to him about it again, and hadn’t been sure how to feel about it. He’d felt some measure of relief, certainly, when he imagined that he’d never have to rehash such humiliation with her again. But, disgustingly, he almost rather wanted to, not just because it meant being around her, but also because it might provide another chance to see that look he just had, the look of triumph that came over her face when she knew she was winning. He’d come to associate that expression entirely with sex, and the thought of it never ceased to make his stomach flip.

She’d also said, what…that his behavior during their chat had…impressed her? Or at least made him more tolerable in her eyes? Had that comment simply been a jest, a passing remark to simply get under his skin, or had she possibly, somehow, meant it? He had spent the previous weeks entirely wrapped inside his own head, certain she hated him since she knew what he had seen that night in the fourth-floor classroom, what he had done there to himself (the thought still turned his insides hot), and for the fact that he’d dared talk to her about it. Had it instead made her appreciate him somehow? Was that even _possible,_ or did he just want to hope that it was?

Yes, she had absolutely gotten under further his skin, whether it was her intention or not. And he felt that she’d absolutely intended it.

Sirius’ gray eyes darted around James’ face, watching, waiting. “There’s so much you’re not telling me that it’s offensive. What is—”

“Come on, we have to go,” James said urgently the second he saw that Lily and Morton had managed to escape Slughorn’s grasp and exit the room. “C’mon,” he repeated, and took off with a purposeful stride towards the door, sidestepping brusquely around Rosemary Cindrey, a sixth year Hufflepuff, who had to stop unexpectedly in her tracks to avoid running into him. He reached Slughorn without issue, and if the professor noticed his rush, he didn’t show it.

“Potter, again, so glad you could make it,” he said with a vigorous handshake. “So sorry I didn’t get to hear much about your future plans, but we must talk soon. And you must come to my Christmas party in just over three weeks time. I’ll owl you, of course—it will be a more formal party, not like this intimate gathering of friends! I’ll have some colleagues from the Ministry here that you really must meet—”

James didn’t hear the rest. He simply nodded at what he assumed were the appropriate times and agreed wholeheartedly with whatever Slughorn suggested—and hoped, later, outside his panicked state, that he hadn’t agreed to anything ridiculous. With Slughorn, it was hard to know.

It seemed to take ages to politely extract himself, but finally Slughorn turned his attention to the Hufflepuffs also trying to take their leave, and he waved Sirius and James off cheerfully.

Once outside the Potion Master’s office, James closed the door behind him firmly and stood perfectly still, listening, cursing his human hearing that paled in comparison to the hearing he had as a stag. He had the sudden wild urge to transform right then so he could maybe pick up their trail, even though he knew he couldn’t, knew how crazy the very idea was. But he had to know, _had_ to know, where Lily and Morton had gone. Back to the fourth floor? The urge to follow them felt primal, as deep and desperate as hunger or thirst.

“Prongs, what are you—”

“Shut up,” James hissed. He took Sirius’ arm and yanked him a few steps away from the door, in case the Hufflepuffs escaped Slughorn in record time. “Look, I have to do something. I’ll see you back at—”

“You really think you’re going by yourself to go do…whatever it is you’re doing?” Sirius had lowered his voice to match James’, and the whisper somehow made the ferocity in his voice sound more intense. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but Prongs, you look seriously—well—mental.”

James felt it. Frustration bubbled up in his chest, tightening his shoulders. He shook his head, trying to relax. It didn’t work. “Okay.” He took a breath. “Look, I have to do something, and I can’t explain to you what it is, or why I’m doing it. Not right now. If you’re going to be a prat about it you can follow me, but don’t say a word, keep in the shadows, and don’t ask me what I’m doing.”

Sirius opened his mouth, paused, and closed it again. His desire to make a joke to lighten the mood read all over his face, but he had clearly thought the better of it. “Okay.”

“ _Okay_ ,” James agreed emphatically, warningly. He spoke quickly then, quietly, the plan forming in his head even as if left his lips. “We’re going to go down this corridor, turn left, and take the tapestry passage—you know, the one behind Mungo Bonham healing those wizards—down to the fourth floor. And then…then when we get to the fourth floor, I might have to check the map, and we might have to put on the cloak, but I’m not sure yet. I’ll know when—”

“Wait, you have them on you? The map and the cloak?”

Sirius’ incredulous tone forced James to realize how absolutely crazy he sounded, and the utter madness of his entire idea. He felt like a man possessed. It hadn’t even struck him as odd when he’d carefully tucked the Marauder’s map and the invisibility cloak into the large inner pocket of his robes before heading to dinner, even though he didn’t carry either on him regularly. Somehow, knowing he was about to see Lily and Morton together had seemed to necessitate bringing them along.

He had no time to process these thoughts. “Yes,” he said shortly. “Look, are you coming?”

His expression still unabashedly baffled, and in no small part concerned, Sirius gestured expansively down the corridor. “Lead on.”

**xxx**

As it turned out, James hadn’t needed his cobbled-together plan at all.

He had just reached his hand behind the tapestry of Mungo Bonham, intent on slipping inside the materializing passageway, when he heard the faintest of voices. He reached out to still Sirius behind him, and felt his friend intake a breath, clearly about to break his word and ask a question. James hit his chest, harder than he’d intended to, and crept along the wall slowly.

Just beyond them, the corridor bent gently right. The opening to the Grand Staircase shined brightly several empty classrooms away, though still distant enough that, to James, it just looked like a small patch of brighter light. Yet the brilliance of that light, however far-off, made him realize that the corridor was much darker he had initially noticed. He had grown so used to traipsing around the castle at night that the movement almost felt like second nature, something he didn’t need vision for, but to actually decipher figures in the dark took several moments. Yet his eyes adjusted and found them eventually, as he had known intuitively, somehow, that he would.

Lily and Morton stood inside an arched alcove, behind the wooden bench that sat in its recess. Shadows played across their forms, partially obscuring them from James’ sight, but he could tell that their bodies were touching, and could see the soft smile on Lily’s pale, upturned face as she leaned back against the wall, listening to whatever Morton said, his voice too low for James to hear. Although the dark and partial seclusion made them seem somewhat far away, James realized quickly just how close they were when Lily responded to Morton, her voice more audible than his for its higher pitch. He also couldn’t make out all her words, but could identify a few.

“I thought we…honestly, just think…”

Behind James, Sirius tensed. James had almost forgotten he was there. Sirius gave a sharp intake of breath, and then let it out with an almost silent, “Oh.” So he saw too, and he understood. Or at least he understood some of it. James wondered, for a moment, if Sirius might pull him away then, more out of a desire to spare him from the sight of Lily with another man than out of respect for her privacy. But he didn’t move, and James didn’t blame him. He understood Sirius’ frozen entrancement all too well, better than he wanted to.

They watched as Lily easily took hold of the collar of Morton’s shirt and leaned up to kiss him. She pushed her other hand into his hair, twisting at the side of his head that left the patterns James had noticed four nights before. Morton’s body seemed to stretch over hers as he pressed her up against the stone wall, his knee between her legs, pinning her in place. Lily’s thighs tightened around his leg, and she ground her hips in a way that made Morton break away from her mouth with a low sound. She gave a breathless laugh, and pulled him back to her, pressing her mouth against his ear, whispering, as he kissed her neck. Even in the dim light, James could see her face as clear as day, her skin somehow lit up from arousal, mouth smiling and eyes closed.

And then she opened her eyes.

Even as Morton worked his way down her neck towards her exposed collarbone, and even as she guided his hand to disappear past the hemline of her skirt that lifted higher and higher towards her hips, she scanned the corridor with the clear, determined gaze that made her such a formidable patroller. Before James could so much as push Sirius back to make a quick break for the secret passage, her eyes passed over their spot. She seemed to look past them at first, as if she hadn’t spotted them. But before relief could set in, her eyes bounced back, and James found her staring at them—no, not at him and Sirius, but _him_ , her eyes locked with his completely. Every muscle in his body clenched painfully.

She laughed.

Whatever James had expected, it was not that.

Morton ceased his movements under her skirt, and pulled away from her, reaching for her hand to bring her with him away from the alcove, a few steps closer to where James and Sirius hid. “We should go—” James heard him say rather shakily. He jerked his head down the corridor, towards the empty classrooms on the way to the Grand Staircase, and even that single gesture looked impatient. “Is one of those—?”

“That one,” she said, nodding towards the second door on the left. “Flitwick used to bring Charms there for practical instruction, but he moved to the third floor in fourth year—closer to his office.”

“How do you know these things?” Morton asked her, marveling, although it was hard to tell if it was at her knowledge or at the curve of her hip, which he stroked almost absently after slipping a hand back up her skirt. Although he had initially pulled away, he seemed have a hard time letting go of her long enough to get somewhere more private.

“Oh, practice,” Lily replied offhandedly. “I’m out here all the time.” She traced a hand down his torso, and although with Morton’s back to him James couldn’t see where it landed, based on Morton’s reaction, he could only assume she now cradled his cock.

“ _Christ_ , Lily…” Morton swore, again with that muggle curse. Had he learned it from her? “Just tell me when you’re out here. I’ll be there.”

While he sounded ragged with desire, her voice was cool, collected, reminding James that she constantly seemed the one in control—and not just with Morton, but also with him. “I’m here now,” she said simply.

Morton grabbed her then, closing the gap between their bodies and mouths with desperate force. “C’mon,” he said when they finally broke apart, his hand still cupping her face, thumb tracing her lips as if he couldn’t stand to stop touching her.

A moment came, again, one of those fleeting, hard-hitting moments of the evening that James increasingly believed came part and parcel when dealing with Lily. But the moment that happened as he crouched behind the wall, watching her, hit him the most

She looked past Morton’s face, again towards the tapestry where James lurked with Sirius a step behind him, tucked further into the shadows. If James had somehow convinced himself that she hadn’t seen him before, he knew then that she had for certain. The look she gave him nearly knocked him backwards. It was that smirk, that mischievous smile that had previously baffled him, but suddenly left him with an unexpected tightness in his balls. 

She absolutely knew he was there. She knew he could see everything.

_She was messing with him_.

And it was starting to seem, he thought with a dry mouth, that, even as much as he hated it, he also liked it, and that she might too.

She didn’t say anything else to Morton, simply broke from his grasp to close the steps to the chosen classroom that she unlocked with a wordless wave of her wand. Morton followed her inside; then the lock clicked again and the corridor fell silent.

The entire episode had lasted no more than three or four minutes, and it seemed to James as though he and Sirius stood frozen for almost the same amount of time. Finally, Sirius pulled him backwards by the collar of his robes into the relative safety behind the tapestry. Once inside, darkness enveloped them briefly, before light seemed to explode from the tip of Sirius’ wand as he conjured a lighted sphere that floated into the middle of the long, narrow passageway. He turned to James immediately, his eyes wide and wild.

“What,” he asked, emphatically stressing every word, “Seriously, _what_ , Prongs, _was_ that?”


	4. Chapter 4

“Describe it to me.”

Despite the crick in his neck, James didn’t bother to lift his head from his knees. “Sirius,” he said impatiently, too frustrated to bother with nicknames. “Stop. I’m not doing that.”

Even though he’d tried to deter Sirius’ questions, there wasn’t a single lie James could imagine that would explain away what had passed between him and Lily in the corridor. At first, he could only think to extract himself from the situation by getting Sirius to drop the entire matter and return to the common room with him. But Sirius made it quickly apparent that this was one issue he didn’t plan to drop, and James had folded under the pressure embarrassingly quickly, in his own opinion. The second he began to talk, the floodgates fully opened, and Sirius had no trouble pulling the entire story out of him as they sat in the cramped passageway—or at least the entire story of the initial night James had found himself trapped in the classroom with Lily and Morton. Reliving just that memory aloud for the first time had twisted his stomach enough. He didn’t want to go further.

In some ways, he found retelling Sirius the saga almost worse than when he had recalled the same events to Lily. She had reacted angrily, justifiably so, but even though he still felt humiliated by the encounter, he discovered a newfound appreciation for how impassively she’d reacted when he’d first started recounting the tale. In contrast, Sirius served as an incredibly captive audience, a trait James had always appreciated in their seven years of friendship, but found suddenly intolerable. Then again, he’d never before had to tell a story quite like the one he recounted, his face on fire. Sirius had laughed, he had exclaimed, he had laughed more, and he had asked questions, countless questions, most of which James batted away with a sharp but simple, “Stop.” He wasn’t about to go into any specifics, no matter how much Sirius pestered him. He drew the line there. He already hated how close the images sat to the forefront of his brain; he didn’t want to unearth them further at any time, but especially while sitting in such confined quarters with his best friend.

“You’d tell me details if it was any other girl,” Sirius pointed out.

James opened his mouth to argue, but when he sat up and saw Sirius’ face, he realized it hadn’t been a “gotcha!” statement, not something Sirius had thrown out to prove a point or make him think. The last time he had lurked in a passageway for a significant amount of time, he’d had to constantly ward off those kinds of remarks from Lily, who had seemed to never say a word if she couldn’t somehow use it add to an argument or to twist in some sort of knife. The need to defend himself had come almost by muscle memory, a leftover response from fending off her verbal blows. But Sirius had spoken mildly, without any guile. James relaxed, only just slightly.

“You know it’s not any other girl.”

He really didn’t need to say more than that. Not to Sirius.

Sirius leaned his head back against the wall, his face thoughtful, although not without the same amusement that had dominated his expression from the moment James had miserably started to explain himself. “Absolutely batshit, if you think about it. What are the odds you would be in the right place at the right time to see Morton acting so shifty, and that what he was up to was getting up in Evans?”

James tried not to pull a face at the latter part of his remark. “I really didn’t know she was there,” he said, and there he did feel the need to defend himself, although Sirius hadn’t sounded even slightly accusatory. “By the time I did, Morton had already locked the door.” He paused for a moment, then added, “He just makes up spells, I guess. I don’t know what he put on the door, but Evans said he made it up himself.” He was an unregistered Animagus and had helped create a complex, interactive map of the entirety of Hogwarts, so Morton’s ability shouldn’t have bothered him. He knew he would probably surpass Morton in skill if he applied himself. Still, it rankled.

He didn’t like when Sirius looked at least mildly impressed. “Pretty advanced. But,” he continued loyally, after seeing James’ face, “What a tosser. Not a good chaser, either. Never beaten us at Quidditch, have they?”

“Not since we joined the team, no.”

“Right. And have you—wait.” Sirius leaned forward, his eyes narrowing. “Why would Evans tell you that?”

“What?”

“Why would she tell you that he made up the spell? Prongs, _how did she know that you’d seen it?”_

Fuck.

James opened and closed his mouth several times. How had he gotten so bad at covering for himself? He’d spent six years talking his way out of trouble, usually with quite a bit of success, and had somehow managed to lose the skill in less than six weeks. Only later, much further in the future, would he realize that he could still cover for himself and lie with perfect ease, just not when it came to Lily.

“She didn’t see you that night?” Sirius persisted.

“No.”

“So, what—you willingly later told her you saw her shag a random bloke?”

James didn’t respond. He could feel the red of his face creeping towards his neck and ears, and the physical sensation somehow added to his embarrassment. Worse, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt embarrassed in front of Sirius, period. He’d thought they had moved past the threshold for embarrassment years earlier, close enough by seventh year that there wasn’t anything they didn’t share, and anything that the other could pass judgment on.

Sirius let out a strangled sort of noise, a strange combination of a laugh and a groan and the attempt to talk all rolled into one. _“Why?”_ he finally managed. “Did you really not think about how bad that would be? If you had told me, I would—”

“—have absolutely told me not to say a word to her about it, I know.” James removed his glasses, more to avoid Sirius’s gaze than out of any physical need. With his vision blurry, the world somehow felt less threatening. “I just…lost it a little.”

_“A little?”_

“I felt bad, Padfoot!” He found he could use Sirius’ nickname again, once he felt more frustration towards himself than his friend. “We’ve actually been getting on so far this year—”

“I’m sure that’s over now.”

“—and it felt just…scummy. She kept being _nice_ to me, and every time she was, I felt worse. Not even because I’d been in the room, but because she had no idea I was. So she acting nice based on this—this false set of assumptions that I’ve not been a total prat this year.”

Sirius fell silent for long enough that James felt he had no choice but to put his glasses back on. When he did, he found his friend still studying him with a significant amount of humor in his eyes, but with a certain amount of pity too, which somehow seemed worse.

“More than anything,” Sirius said slowly, measuredly, “I’m honestly surprised you’re still alive, after you told her.”

At that, James couldn’t help but crack a smile, however small. “I am too.”

“What did she do?”

“Well, she hexed me.”

Sirius nodded. “No shock there. With what?”

“I have no idea, but I’ve never seen anything like it before. Shattered my shield charm.”

“And then what, she hit you with something worse?”

James hesitated. “Not exactly.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Padfoot—”

Sirius looked increasingly interested. “No, don’t even try that. You have to tell me now. What did she do?” His voice turned slow, thoughtful. “I’ve seen her eviscerate you verbally. I’ve seen her curse you like…like nothing else in this world, I don’t even know to explain it. The skin-stretching hex you mentioned earlier was nothing compared to some of the other spells she’s thrown at you. Whatever she did, it must have been crazy, because right now you look like…”

He didn’t have to finish his sentence. James knew he must look every bit as cornered as he felt, and he had once again broken into a sweat from the heat that flooded out of his chest and into the rest of his body like fire.

“Do you still have your balls?” Sirius asked abruptly, and James almost wanted to laugh, not at the joke exactly, but more so at Sirius’ consistent need to lighten any solemn moment.

“I do.”

“So it honestly can’t be _that_ bad, mate. You had me worried that—”

“She made me admit just—all sorts of shit,” James interrupted, trying hard not to fumble further over his words as what remained of his pride piqued. “She boxed me into this corner and made me tell her that I fancied her, and that watching her with Morton made me jealous, and that I jerked off watching them.”

For a moment, Sirius simply stared at him. Then he began laughing.

“I’m sorry, Prongs, I’m sorry!” he said quickly as James, feeling more humiliated than angry, rose to leave. Sirius got up just enough to shove him back down, no easy feat in the cramped passageway, and then sat again himself, giving what looked like at least a valiant attempt to get himself together. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, unable to suppress a final snigger. “It’s just—that’s _really_ fucked up.”

Some of James’ irritation vanished immediately. He hadn’t realized how much he needed someone to empathize with his plight. “You have no idea,” he agreed with considerably more enthusiasm than he had shown their entire conversation.

“How did she get you to do it? Did she disarm you?”

“No.” He felt foolish again, although nowhere near as much as he had moments before. The worst of it seemed to have passed, and he mainly felt relieved. He’d badly needed to get it all out, worse than he’d thought. “She literally just used her words. She…she coerced me into it. I don’t know how else to put it. She just…convinced me I should tell her.”

Sirius gave another snort of laughter, but at least had the decency to look apologetic. “I don’t understand, mate.”

“I don’t either. She just did it.”

“Okay, but beyond that…” Sirius paused, and he sounded, to James’ ears, rather detached. Perhaps he had switched his tone consciously, James considered gratefully, to make up for his laughter, in the hopes that making the incident seem less personal would detract some of James’ embarrassment. If that was his plan, it worked a little. “You and Evans talked about this, what, three weeks ago?”

“More or less.”

“Haven’t seen her yell at you since. And tonight at dinner she was… _friendly_.” He somehow managed to make the final word sound dirty, dirtier than any of the various questions he’d asked about her shagging Morton.

“Part of her logic was that if she embarrassed me badly enough, she’d get over feeling embarrassed quicker. Like my embarrassment would trump hers.” To James, it sounded much less convincing when he tried to explain it, compared to when she had laid it out for him. “It made sense. Well, sort of. At least enough that I did it. And it kind of worked, I guess, because she’s been perfectly fine to me ever since.”

“Not just fine, Prongs. She was _nice_ tonight. On purpose. Thought she was flirting with you after dinner, but after that out there…” Sirius gestured wildly towards the passage’s entrance to the corridor, at least as wildly as he could without hitting his hand against the stone wall. “That was entirely her fucking with you. She knew we would follow her.”

James had already had such thoughts, of course. But to really believe it had seemed entirely too arrogant, as if he thought her world revolved around him. And seeing her with Morton had reminded him that he hardly mattered in her world. He said as much to Sirius.

“I think it shows the opposite. Try to follow my logic—actually, scratch that, you’ll definitely follow this, because you followed whatever her crazy shit was about embarrassment so closely that you told her you got off to watching her shag Morton. What I’m about to say is a lot less ridiculous than whatever that nonsense was.” James made a face, which Sirius blew past without comment; clearly he didn’t consider it was too early to crack jokes at James’ expense. “She was giving you weird vibes after dinner that got your interest up, and she made sure you saw her leave with Morton. And then there she was, what, a hundred feet away from Slughorn’s office, putting Morton’s hand up her skirt? She’s obviously in charge of that git—there’s no way he stopped them there. She knew you were going to follow them and set it up.”

James had considered all the same things almost as soon as he saw them entwined in the hallway, but it felt then—and continued to feel—like his own wishful thinking, born out of desperation to make the best out of a shit situation.

His doubts must have shown all over his face, and Sirius interpreted them correctly. “Prongs, come off it. She was _looking for you_. You saw that. I don’t think she even noticed I was there.” He managed to sound only slightly put out.

“She knew there were other people around,” James countered. “She could have just been keeping an eye out generally. Just because she saw me doesn’t mean she was looking for me.”

“Right, okay,” Sirius agreed sarcastically, and for the first time he seemed to grow impatient. He dragged a hand through his hair, a frustrated gesture James recognized that they shared, and had shared long enough that he wasn’t sure who had gotten it from the other. “I’m sure that’s why she carried on after she saw you, and actually moved closer to where we were to keep going at him. Because she was ‘keeping a lookout.’ So you’re saying that if she had seen Snivellus and his band of merry bellends instead of us, she wouldn’t have screamed or gotten out of there, but would have still grabbed Morton’s cock?”

James looked away. So she had definitely done that. Sirius saw it too. “I hate him,” he said quietly.

“Who? Morton or Snivellus?” Sirius did his best to keep his tone light.

James was having none of it. “Morton.”

“I know, Prongs.” Sirius didn’t sound the slightest bit amused, just rather quiet and almost defeated as well. “Fuck him.”

They sat silently for a long while.

“What do I do?” James finally asked. He tried to remember the last time he had genuinely asked Sirius for advice. If he wanted encouragement, someone to egg him on into any idea—ideas good or bad, but typically bad—he went to Sirius. But he’d gone to Remus for advice, actual advice, for as long as he could remember.

Sirius shrugged. “Beats me.”

“Padfoot.”

“I don’t know, talk to her,” Sirius suggested almost flippantly. “Roll the dice. You already talked to her once and she didn’t kill you. Might as well try it again.”

“Do you remember telling me—in this same conversation, no less—that I was an idiot for talking to her in the first place?”

“Oh, sure,” Sirius replied, not offended at all. “But that was different. Now it’s like she wants to talk to you, because she set it up this time, and you can argue against that all you want, Prongs, but I will not back off it. She wanted you to react somehow. No idea how. She’s weird, beyond anything I ever imagined.”

Somehow, though, it sounded as though it made him like her better.

James rubbed the back of his still-tense neck. “Even if you’re right, she’ll flip it on me and I’ll end up apologizing.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know,” he said, but he did. He waited only a fraction of a second before admitting, “If I talk to her about it, she’ll probably accuse me of being out of bed the other night when she was out with Morton again.”

Sirius stared at him. “Why does that surprise me?” he asked, almost more to himself. “That shouldn’t surprise me. Nothing about this should surprise me anymore. _Were_ you out of bed, Prongs?”

“Yes. I didn’t manage to close the passage on the fourth floor, you know, the one by the suit of armor. I must not have hit the switch correctly. She knew what it was, because I had taken her in there when we talked, and she saw that it was open after she and Morton took off separately.” To Sirius’ great credit, he didn’t express any indignation that James had shown one of their main secret passageways to someone outside of the Marauders. James waited for him to comment so he could apologize, but Sirius simply waved for him to continue. “She didn’t see me, because I had the cloak on, but she said my name out loud.”

There were a million things Sirius could have said in response, and he stayed silent long enough that James reckoned that he had probably considered them all. He finally settled on, “I bet that was terrifying.”

“You have no idea. Nearly shit myself.”

James expected Sirius to at least smile at that, but he didn’t. “Prongs?” he asked, almost unwillingly. “How did you know they were together the other night? The map?”

James knew he should have felt embarrassed as he had only minutes before, but found he had reached his capacity for humiliation, which relieved him more than anything. “Yeah.” He felt tired.

“Do you look at it a lot?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re obsessed.”

James leaned his head back miserably. “I know.” He reached into the pocket of his robes, pulled out the map, and tossed the precious parchment to his friend. “Take it. Hide it. I’ll probably look for it, and probably find it.”

Sirius turned the map over in his hands. “Let’s go up,” he said abruptly, pulling himself to his feet and extending a hand to James. “If we stay much longer, I’ll check myself to see if they’re still in the other room together.”

James stood without his help, even though refusing the offer made clambering to his feet a little more awkward with such little space. “Not funny yet.”

“Sorry,” Sirius said cheerfully, but the apology seemed genuine on his face. “Maybe eventually.”

James stopped him as he turned to leave, grabbing his robes right before Sirius could lead them out into the corridor. “Padfoot, don’t tell the lads. I mean, don’t tell anyone, obviously, but…also not the lads.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Sirius replied, tone still brisk, but James knew, again, just from the look on his face, that he meant it.

**xxx**

It took James a single night’s sleep to decide that he had no other plan of action than to follow Sirius’ (absurdly logical, for once) suggestion to talk to Lily.

Actually following through with the plan took more time. To his deep shame, feeling as if he’d betrayed his house and all that it stood for, James found in the days that followed that he was simply too much of a coward to pull her for a chat. He came up with a hundred different justifications every day for why he couldn’t approach her at any given moment.

For starters, he didn’t want to talk to her anywhere too public—like before or after class or in the Great Hall, in case she went off on him—which he assumed was pretty much guaranteed.

He felt much the same about the Gryffindor common room in the evenings, only more so, really, because everyone who really mattered to him congregated there constantly. At least in the Great Hall, he reasoned, people spread out enough that it might go unnoticed to some if Lily started yelling at him. He didn’t want to face that embarrassment in a more enclosed space, in front of the people whose opinions mattered.

Further, he reasoned that it was wrong to try to talk to her any evening before Quidditch practice—and that pretty much meant every day. He didn’t want her reaction (if negative, as he could only assume it would be) to affect his game or his leadership as captain.

Really, between those three excuses, he managed to write off all day every day as the wrong time to talk to her.

The full moon came around again, passing with little incident only days after Slughorn’s dinner party. Sirius hadn’t mentioned their conversation to James again, but he had suggested—cheerfully, but all the same—that they share the cloak, the two of them, on the way out to the Whomping Willow, and he hadn’t allowed James to dawdle in the castle. James knew he should have felt grateful for that, and for Sirius’ agreement to hide the map as well, but he couldn’t but feel a little resentful too. After all, Sirius had listened to him recount what had happened, but he didn’t truly understand. James knew because he didn’t truly understand any of it himself.

The day after the full moon, the four of them huddled together in the Herbology Greenhouse Six, exhausted but none the worse for the wear, aside from Remus sporting a slight limp.

“It’ll pass,” he told his friends, rubbing his hands together briskly. The weather had warmed slightly in recent days, perhaps one last hurrah before the cold really descended, but he always felt a bit weaker before and after the moon, and couldn’t seem to fight off the slight chill in the air. “It’s in my hip too, and I can’t think of a spell that would fix it.”

“Has to be from when you tripped over that tree root,” Sirius insisted.

“You did go flying, Moony,” Peter agreed.

“If Padfoot wasn’t chasing me—”

Sirius waved an impatient hand. “But I was. Whatever, we chase you all the time. Well, Prongs and I do. Wormtail tries. And, Merlin, you somehow went _under_ that root, Wormtail. It was impressive.”

Peter grinned, pleased at the praise. “Thanks. But I only knew it was there because I saw Moony fall. It looked bad.”

“I swear I felt my leg twist,” Remus muttered somewhat testily, with none of his typical mildness.

James waited for Sirius to step in to offer some facetious comment to get them laughing, but immediately froze when he instead hissed, “Stuff it.” They all fell silent at once, undoubtedly suspiciously, and then Sirius began to talk about Quidditch, managing to sound, impressively, as though he had been in the middle of a sentence, “—but there’s no way they get the snitch first. Talkalot has nothing on Murk, not in terms of speed—oi, Evans! Good morning. Coming to the Quidditch match Saturday?”

James turned to find Lily behind him, a Gryffindor scarf draped across her shoulders and a thick sheaf of parchment held in her hand. He took a step away from her without thinking, and cursed himself for how weak that made him feel, if not look.

She didn’t seem to notice. “Have I ever missed one?” she asked.

“Wouldn’t know,” Sirius answered. “I’ve never noticed. Don’t really look at the stands.”

“Then does it matter if I’m there?” She turned towards Remus. “Here.” She held the stack of parchment out towards him, and James recognized her neat hand looped across the top page. “Arithmancy notes from yesterday.”

Remus tucked them under his arm, a grateful smile across his pale face. “Thanks. Anything interesting happen?”

“Does it ever? Well, Vector did give us a new numerical chart—it’s the bottom page. We can go over it, if you like. I can’t pretend to fully understand it yet, but I haven’t set it on fire, which is more than I can say for Ferguson. His somehow went up in the middle of class, and I still don’t understand how, because I don’t think he even had his wand out. You should have seen Vector’s face.”

Remus laughed, and James found he didn’t like the sound. His annoyance didn’t actually stem from anything about Remus’ actions, he knew. The logical part of his brain could even acknowledge that it was good to see him show any kind of good humor, because James knew, no matter how Remus tried to brush it off, that his leg bothered him more than he let on. But illogically, James found it irritated him something fierce to watch Lily offer his friend help so easily, an unspoken statement of the nature of their friendship. He had known that they studied together for Arithmancy, and had ever since third year —after all, Remus had never tried to hide it. Still, he had never exactly liked it, all too aware as the years passed that this displeasure stemmed from simple jealousy.

But his jealousy no longer felt quite so simple. It seemed like everyone around him interacted with Lily more easily than he could ever manage. It aggravated him to no end.

He found himself further annoyed at the slight, irrepressible spike of fear he’d felt when he’d realized she had managed to appear behind him before he had noticed. Over the previous few days, he’d tried so studiously to avoid finding a time to speak to her that he’d begun to avoid her altogether, and it had startled him—no, past startled, _scared_ him—to find her suddenly upon him with no warning. And it made him mad that he felt that way, when she could breeze up to him so easily, apparently unaffected by whatever there was between them.

But even as he turned t all over in his mind , he understood that what he feared the most—and therefore what added the most to his anger—was the possibility that he’d imagined that there was anything between them at all.

**xxx**

James held onto that anger, gripped it tightly and carried it with him into their next prefect meeting.

“Can I talk to you?” he asked Lily once the meeting had concluded. He’d hardly said two words the entire time, desperate to maintain his fierce determination.

“Yeah, okay.” Even as his own heart began to beat faster, she seemed completely at ease. She looked to Marguerite Bennett, who waited for her by the door, the last of the lingering prefects. “Wait for me, will you?”

“Actually, we might be a bit.” James didn’t care how rude he sounded. Bennett looked puzzled, but then shrugged. As she left, James crossed towards the Transfiguration door to close it smartly behind her. He could have banished it closed, easily, but there was something much more satisfying about shutting it manually, harder than necessary. It also gave him something to do with his hands, which had already begun to sweat.

“Everything okay?” Lily asked before he could even turn around.

When he did turn, he saw that she looked sincerely nonplussed—unless, he reckoned, that too was an act. He had no idea how to read her whereas she understood and manipulated him so easily, and recognizing it dialed his frustration up another notch. Still, he didn’t expect to sound so angry, and felt some satisfaction when she jumped slightly as he spat, “What’s going on?”

She stared. “I’m sorry?”

“What the actual fuck are you doing?” She continued to look at him blankly, and his words became more punctuated, more staccato, as if to help clarify things. “I saw you. With Morton. After Slughorn’s party.”

“Oh. That.” The growing fine line between her eyebrows relaxed, and she reached up to touch her face, visibly relieved. “You scared me!” she scolded with what sounded like almost a laugh. “I thought something was seriously wrong.”

“Something is wrong!”

She rolled her eyes, and her tone turned rather lofty. “Don’t be so dramatic.”

He bent to grip the edges of the school desk closest to him. For a wild second, he thought he might throw it across the room, and the muscles in his arms contracted, readying. The desk made it barely an inch off the ground before he thought better of it, and he dropped it back down. “Then don’t dismiss me. You inserted me into your shit with Morton on purpose. It’s not dramatic that I’m mad about that!”

He waited for her to deny that she had set up the rendezvous, placed strategically so he would find her, but on that, she didn’t push back.

He knew Sirius would have an absolute field day when he told him _that_ little fact.

“You weren’t mad when _you_ inserted _yourself_ into my ‘shit with Morton.’” Her voice grew thinner when she repeated his words back to him, but she didn’t even bother to look at him. She began to pack up her bag, carefully storing the minutes from their prefect meeting in a thick binder, and then began fussing over how to store her eagle feather quill. The actions felt almost more dismissive than her words.

“Yes, but I didn’t mean to do that! And you did this on purpose!” When she still didn’t look at him, James snapped. He pulled his wand from his robes, and in a flash her binder had exploded, spewing pieces of parchment like water from a fountain.

Her expression hardened, but she didn’t reach for her wand or make a move to collect the sheaves that wafted slowly towards the floor. “What about what _you_ did on purpose?” she shot back, and she threw her empty binder to the floor with a loud clatter, her anger swelling to meet his. “You didn’t have to follow me after Slughorn’s party. You chose to.”

James knew that, logically. But he had felt in the moment—and even then, staring at her—that there was no other path for him to take, although he knew she wouldn’t stand for an explanation like that. “Okay, so I chose to follow you.” he relented, and his conversation with Sirius flashed into his mind. He had told Sirius that she would somehow flip this on him, but hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly. “Does that surprise you?”

She didn’t hesitate. “No.”

“Well, I was _very_ fucking surprised to see you. Not with Morton, mind—I assumed you’d be with him, wherever you went. But I was surprised when you saw me, and you kept going with him. Evans, I watched him feel you up, and you knew I was there when he did it!” He heard his voice escalate at the last sentence, and hated it. Somehow,even in her anger,she managed to come off as impassive, as if she didn’t really care what they argued about, but simply took umbrage with his raised voice. He hated that he couldn’t match that apparent lack of care, inwardly or outwardly.

“You’re right,” she agreed sharply, and even as the dangerous flush of irritation remained on her cheeks, the corners of her mouth curled when he had to reach down to physically steady himself from surprise. “Don’t look so shocked. You knew I saw you.”

“But—but _why_?” he sputtered, raising his voice, thrown completely off-balance.

“Why?” she repeated, her volume growing to match his, and her face straightened, any ounce of glee disappearing rapidly.

“Yes, _why?_ You were so mad when I told you that I’d seen—well—you with Morton. Before.” He didn’t know how else to put it without going somewhere crass. “Why would you want me see to it again?”

“Why?” she repeated a second time, and he thought for a moment that she might be stalling for time, until she swept down to pick up her binder and chucked it towards his head with surprisingly good aim, her eyes blazing. He managed to duck just in time, and heard it hit the wall behind him with a dull _thunk_. “Why do you do _anything_ that you do, Potter?” There was something about her scorn as she hissed his name that brought him firmly back to all their clashes in years past. He hadn’t heard her sound quite so angry at him yet since the start of the term, not even in the secret passageway. “Why did you do _anything_ you’ve done for the past six years? Why did you bully Snape daily? Why did you sneak out of the common room basically every night? Why did you never give me a moment’s peace? Why did you transfigure my backpack into a sloth, which somehow destroyed all my notes right before our Charms exam? Because it was _fun_?”

Of all her questions, the last one, so specific, gave him the most pause. The sloth incident had happened around Christmas their fifth year, if he remembered correctly. Apparently she hadn’t gotten over it.

The entire interrogation had sounded rhetorical, but when she didn’t continue, he realized she waited for an answer. “Well—some of it was fun, yeah,” he hedged defensively.

“So maybe this was fun for me! You don’t get to own acting impulsively, or having a laugh at other people’s expense! It’s not—”

The classroom door flew open, and Professor McGonagall stormed in, fire in her eyes and her wand held aloft. “Potter! Evans!”

James took a step behind the desk in front of him, as if it could offer him some sort of protection.

McGonagall took in the sight of their red faces, the binder on the floor behind where James stood, and the volume of parchment that spread across the classroom like oversized confetti, and her chest swelled indignantly. “ _This_ is how you treat my classroom? _This_ is how you treat the trust I’ve shown in letting you use it? _This_ is the example you want to set as Head Boy and Girl? _This?”_

Lily seemed to shrink several sizes, her rage immediately dissipating in a way that James would have assumed impossible moments before. Had she ever been on the receiving end of McGonagall’s wrath before? Sure, James knew, she had seen McGonagall tear him and his friends apart almost weekly, but he doubted that McGonagall, or any other professor, had ever so much as expressed disappointment in her. “I’m sorry, Professor,” she said quietly, eyes on the floor.

“I expected better of you, Evans.” Lily flinched. “As for _you_ , Potter—”

“Professor, I started all of this,” he said, cutting her off quickly. “I picked a fight, and I sent Evans’ papers flying. It’s my fault.”

“Is that why I could hear you _both_ yelling all the way down the corridor? Do you know how many students traverse this corridor, Potter? What do you suppose they think about their Head Boy and Girl now?”

“Probably nothing great,” he said earnestly. “But, Professor, you can’t expect that two people in joint leadership positions to always agree. Evans and I haven’t quarreled at all this year.” At least that publically. “It got out of hand, I’ll admit, but ask the other prefects—we’ve worked together well. We just disagreed today. It won’t happen again.”

“I might believe you, Potter, if your track record with Evans didn’t include so many similar dustups,” McGonagall said coldly. She looked to Lily, her lips thin with ire, but after observing her for a moment just shook her head. “Clean it up,” she ordered tersely, turning on one heal. “Apologize to each other. And _act better_ , the both of you. I _will_ rescind your right to use this room, and I _will_ take points off if I ever see this kind of behavior again—yes, from my own house! Don’t think I won’t!” She stormed from the room, and the door flew magically shut behind her.

Lily immediately sank down to sit on McGonagall’s desk, her face in her hands.

James swallowed. He twirled his wand, and sent the loose pieces of parchment flying through the air to form a neat stack at her side. “Evans?” he tried tentatively. She didn’t move. “Evans, could you…not sit there?”

“Why?” she asked wanly.

He shifted, no longer angry, just restless and uncomfortable. Any attempts at delicacy vanished. “The last time I saw you sit on a desk, you had no knickers on.”

She looked up at this, and the heat in her face seemed to flush a little darker. She let out a slight laugh under her breath that sounded almost against her own wishes, and the sound made James’ chest twinge with pride. “You can’t be thinking about that now.”

“Is that a challenge or a bet?”

She didn’t answer, but moved to slide down, and James turned away, happy to have the excuse to do something, anything. He picked up her binder and brought it over to where she stood, no longer sitting but still leaning on the desk, her arms crossed over her chest. “That was horrible,” she said colorlessly.

James picked up her stack of parchment and busied himself with arranging them inside the binder. He assumed she had some system for organizing her notes, something he’d never figure out in a million years, but she didn’t look to check or critique his attempt. “You get used to it,” he assured her.

“I don’t want to get used to it.”

“Your choice, I guess. But when you’re used to making professors mad, even McGonagall can’t bother you. And she’s the worst.”

Lily sighed, and when she spoke, her voice sounded heavy. “I just feel really _stupid_. She was right—this is not the way we’re supposed to act. And everyone in the corridor absolutely heard us yelling, and then heard her yell at us.”

Without thinking, James reached out to touch her, just to clasp a hand to her shoulder or pat her back, the same gesture he might have given Sirius or Remus or Peter in a similar situation, before he realized that she wasn’t someone he could comfort like that. He pulled his hand back before his fingers so much as brushed the fabric of her robes, but she looked up anyway, catching him in the act. Somehow, the intense green of her eyes made him feel smaller in that moment than he’d felt the entire time McGonagall had berated them.

“C’mon, let’s go somewhere.” The words escaped his mouth before his brain truly thought them through, but as soon as he heard himself say them, he was committed. He stuffed her binder and forgotten quill into her backpack, and held it out to her.

She took it wordlessly. There was a look on her face not unlike the one he’d seen on the fifth-floor stairwell when he’d suggested they take the shortcut to the common room. He could almost visually see the way she turned his words over in her mind, debating his offer, and somehow he read in her expression that she would probably refuse.

Her answer didn’t match her expression. “Where?” she asked simply, straightening up.

**xxx**

Unsure of where else to go, James took her to the one place that always made him feel better: the kitchens.

“You need chocolate,” he told her confidently as she looked around, awe-struck, at the busy sights and sounds of the cavernous room, and at the legions of house-elves that ran it.

“This isn’t Defense Against the Dark Arts and McGonagall isn’t a dark creature,” she said, but she’d nearly smiled, and she had accepted the hot chocolate and basket of pastries the house-elves brought to their table.

They sat in silence for a bit, a silence James couldn’t decipher as companionable or awkward or somewhere in between. He watched Lily’s hands as she absently tore apart a Danish, leaving just as many pieces uneaten on her plate as she put in her mouth.

“Do you just go around tickling portraits and prodding at armor?” she asked after she’d finished nearly half her mug. “Because I don’t understand how else you find these places.”

James shrugged, fully intending to brush the question off, but his mouth didn’t comply. “We talk to a lot of the portraits, and Nearly-Headless Nick helped us massively. He’s been around long enough that he knows more than anyone, but he’s not exactly forthcoming—he’s too long-winded to get much out of him right away. You really have to dig. I sometimes feel like I know more about him than I’d like. And most portraits just seem happy when anyone talks to them. If they know anything, they’re usually willing to share.”

“Are you ever anywhere without them?”

It took him a second to realize that he’d unconsciously spoken in the plural, ‘we’ and ‘us,’ without realizing it. “The lads?”

“Yeah.”

“I try not to be.” The answer was more honest than she probably knew.

She discarded her half-eaten Danish and wrapped her hands around her mug. “Thanks.” She glanced at his face, understood his confusion, and clarified, “For trying to take the heat from McGonagall.”

He couldn’t remember a time she had ever thanked him. But then again, had he ever done anything worth her gratitude?

For some reason, her appreciation sat uncomfortably on his shoulders. “It was the truth. I did start everything, and I did send your notes flying. Which…sorry about that. I really don’t have a good record with you and notes. At least there was no sloth this time.”

He thought she might smile, but she just sighed. “I fully expected you to start a row with me after the night of Slughorn’s party, though. Honestly, I expected it sooner.”

“Oh.” He knew he sounded as stupid as he felt. He didn’t even bother with duplicity. “I was avoiding you.”

“I know. You said it—you’re not exactly subtle.” She looked up from her mug, and he saw a bit of the old challenge flicker in her eyes. “You weren’t subtle when you traipsing around the fourth floor the other night either.”

He froze, and saw from the way that her face changed that the movement—or lack of movement—confirmed everything to her.

“Sorry.” He didn’t know what else to say, but couldn’t help but feel that he apologized to her way too often. He fought the urge to ruffle his hair, aware that she hated his typical nervous habit. He propped his elbow onto the table and settled for digging his fingers into his fringe, so he could rest his forehead against his palm. The move obscured her from his vision.

“Do you ever actually sleep?”

“Lately? No.” And he hated that that was the truth, and that she was the reason why.

He heard her shift, as if the bench underneath her had become suddenly uncomfortable, and then the scrape of porcelain against the top of the table as she pushed her mug away. “Potter, look at me.”

He didn’t move other than to flick his eyes towards her. Her eyes glittered strangely as she stared back.

“Were you in the room? When you were out the other night?”

James’ elbow slipped off the table in surprise. “What?” He hadn’t even considered that she might jump to such an (what suddenly very reasonable) assumption. “No. No, honestly. I got there and saw you both leave the room. But that was it.” It was almost the truth. What was the purpose of telling her that he’d only seen them leave because he’d waited?

“Do you swear?”

“Solemnly.”

A voice in the back of his head nagged incessantly. If he’d had the chance to be in the room, to see her again, would he have done it?

He hated how much the answer felt like yes.

She surveyed him longer, her eyes darting back and forth between each of his, as if she searched for something there. He forced himself not to look away, desperate to avoid any evidence of guilt. It felt much like battling a hippogriff. After a few tense moments she unexpectedly relented, and somehow her gaze became, if not soft, at least less sharp. “Okay,” she agreed simply, just like that. She pulled her mug back into her hands. “Were you still there when I saw that you’d left the passageway open?”

“Yes.”

“I knew it!” She sounded vaguely triumphant, almost not mad at all. “I knew it. I felt crazy, but I knew someone was there, and that it had to be you.”

“I’m sorry,” he offered awkwardly again. He wasn’t sure what else to say.

“Well, you can’t be mad, then,” she said, her tone all brisk business. She plucked a muffin from the basket of pastries to dissect like the discarded Danish.

He figured he should have gotten used to her abrupt topic changes by then, but she somehow still succeeded in giving him emotional whiplash. “What now?”

“You can’t be mad that you saw me with Morton after Slughorn’s party if you’re literally out there trying to find us other nights. Were you there other times?”

Something swooped across his stomach, low and sick. “There were other times?”

She quirked an eyebrow suspiciously. “Are you taking the piss?” He shook his head, and she seemed to accept that he wasn’t joking. “I don’t know, then, you tell me.”

He stared. “Are _you_ taking the piss?”

“Again, you tell me. You’re apparently somehow always in the right place at the right time. You should know.”

“It’s starting to feel like the wrong place at the wrong time.”

She laughed quietly under her breath, and despite the shrewdness of her tone, she did almost seem genuinely amused. “It probably should have immediately, Potter.” The laugher died off her face. “But…I kind of had to, the other night. Set you up, that is, after Slughorn’s party. I mean, there were probably other ways, but I knew you would follow me when you saw me leave with Morton. And I knew if you saw us, I would end up finding out some way or another if you had been lurking around the corridor the other night when I found the passage open. I figured you’d probably get angry, we’d row, and I’d pull it out of you.”

He stared. Was he that predictable, that easy for her to manipulate?

She seemed to know exactly what he thought. “Again, you kind of lack subtlety. But…I also could have just asked you instead. I didn’t trust you to tell me the truth, but …you haven’t lied to me yet, I guess, even when you probably should have. So maybe I should have just asked.”

It sounded almost like an apology.

“Was it fun?” he asked her suddenly, and it was her turn to look taken aback.

“What?”

“You said before that I wasn’t the only one who got to be impulsive and have fun.” He chose to studiously ignore all the other things she had said in addition, all the listing of his past actions that she’d so clearly loathed and obviously still held against him. He had a feeling he would give himself no choice but to dwell on them later, anyway.

“Oh, that.” She tried to sound casual, but as he began to feel more confident deciphering at least some of her moods, he didn’t miss the wicked sharpness that came to her eye. “Kind of,” she said, although her tone implied ‘very.’

He snorted, and as she swatted at him across the table, it made his heart twist with adrenaline. He had watched her pull the same move on Morton in the midst of their tryst, and on Sirius the night of Slughorn’s party when he’d started bantering with her about the Conjunctivitis Curse. There was something so simply carefree in the gesture, a sorting of teasing that seemed like it passed only between friends.

And had she ever touched him before?

“You get this look on your face that just makes me want to laugh,” she continued, and James had to remind himself forcefully that any fondness he heard in her voice stemmed entirely from tormenting him. But he still liked it, much as he didn’t want to. “I don’t know how to describe it. You looked it a few weeks ago when you told me you saw me with Morton—which still seems like a stupid move—”

He couldn’t disagree with that assessment.

“—but I was too mad to find it funny. But the other night…” She laughed then, low and soft, and he recognized the sound immediately. She had gotten one over on him, she knew it, and she enjoyed it.

“You just like being in control,” he observed, not without some terseness. He knew his ears had gone red.

“And _you_ just like trying to figure out if I’m wearing knickers. We both have our flaws.”

James winced as his stomach filled with heat, but from anything but displeasure. “Evans.” He tried to mimic the warning manner she always pulled off so well, but his words came out panicky instead. “Don’t say that.”

“Why? Because you like it? Or because you want to know?” Everything about her tone implied that she already knew the answer was “yes” to both questions.

“You like it too.” He’d thrown it out, not sure if he believed it entirely, until he watched the way she leaned back slightly—only an inch or two, but enough that he noticed—as if thrown off-kilter. Somehow, that told him everything he needed to know.

“Well, sure,” she agreed, and he could suddenly read suddenly how she made the words sound exceptionally casual, overly so, as if to cover for herself. Had he ever picked up on it before? “But like you said…” She gestured to him, and then to herself. “You like impulse. I like control.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. “I never said I liked impulse…” he finally muttered, and then quickly sat up straight as he watched her pick up her bag and rise. “Are you leaving?”

“Yeah. Hestia and I are meant to do our Transfiguration together.” It wasn’t lost on him that she always managed to leave him during every conversation, never the other way around. To his surprise, she hesitated as she stepped past him and touched his shoulder, so lightly with the tips of her fingers that he could barely feel it through his robes. “Thanks. Again. For everything with McGonagall…and all this.” She lifted her hand away from him to gesture vaguely towards the ceiling of the wide, warm kitchen.

A fierce flame of pleasure burned suddenly in his chest. “Of course. Anytime.”

She seemed to recognize that he meant it. After looking away from him quickly, she left without another word.


	5. Chapter 5

“Do you see Sluggy? Is he guarding the door?”

For the first time in weeks, James held the Marauders Map between his hands, and the parchment felt like an old friend. He took Sirius’ hand to move his lit wand closer, and their heads almost touched as they both leaned forward, surveying the layout of Slughorn’s office. “Dunno. It’s hard to tell. Can you see?”

Slughorn often packed his office to the brim during Slug Club meetings, which made reading the name labels on the Marauders Map difficult enough. But the number of attendees to his Christmas party every December escalated the problem, and the room became a wriggling, black mass of labels, clustered, overlapping, and illegible. Deciphering just one name seemed impossible, let alone picking Slughorn’s name out of all the rest.

Sirius squinted, then sighed. “No. We’ll just have to chance it, then.” He watched as James wiped the map clean, and his expression darkened just slightly. “Remember, Prongs, I could have brought a date to this. You’re welcome.”

James grinned. “Thanks, pal. But you didn’t bring a date last year either.” Silently, they slipped out from behind the tapestry of Mungo Bonham on the fifth floor. The smells and sounds of Slughorn’s party—rich food, loud conversation, and some sort of strange, caterwauling tune—hit them immediately. They had waited an extra hour past the party’s start to make sure that things had gotten to full swing by the time they arrived, and it sounded like they had succeeded.

Sirius extinguished his wand, tucked it into the inner chest pocket of his navy blue dress robes, and then straightened his lapel as they started towards Slughorn’s office. “Sounded tedious, then, having a date when you don’t really like a bird. Still does. But I’m just saying that I _could_ have found a date, not that I wanted to. I could have rustled something up if Evans had agreed to come with you.”

“I didn’t ask her.”

The corners of Sirius’ mouth pulled down in brief disbelief. “Huh. That’s a first.” He nudged James and gestured up ahead, to a trio of elderly warlocks ambling slowly towards the party. “Let’s hang back and see if we hear Slughorn when they go in.” When they’d left the common room, Sirius had suggested that they turn his goal of the night, avoiding Slughorn, into a challenge, and seemed to take it very seriously as soon as James approved.

James had felt a bit bad at first, but came around to the idea quickly when he remembered that he had escaped the last Slug Club dinner by agreeing with whatever Slughorn had said. He really had no idea what the Potions Master had in store for him.

“D’you think she’s going with him, then?” Sirius asked abruptly, as they watched the warlocks step through the doorway into the dim, golden light of the office.

James didn’t have to ask to know he meant Lily and Morton. “Doubt it. But I’m sure McKinnon and Rooney will go together, so they’ll probably make a nice, happy quartet anyway.” He tried his best to not sound too bitter.

“Really? McKinnon and Rooney? I didn’t know.” Sirius paused, thoughtful. “Huh. Real shame. He’s kind of a git, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know, I'm sure he’s fine.” It would take up all his time, James had decided weeks ago, to dislike too many Ravenclaws just because they orbited around Morton. “Seems alright in class, anyway. But c’mon, I don’t hear Slughorn. Let’s go.”

Against the odds, they managed to make it inside the party unseen. The room had been transformed, entirely unrecognizable from the same office where they had had dinner only a few weeks prior. Sheer, silvery hangings draped down across the ceiling, held in place by several gently rotating chandeliers that bathed the room is a flickering, golden light. The hangings floated down the walls and pooled along the floor, which was packed with all manner of people, as the Marauders Map had suggested. James spied Slughorn’s corpulent form towards the middle of the room, not far from where a musician crooned a slow, mournful tune. His bandmate supplied the caterwauling noise James had first picked up in the hall, plucking at a many-stringed instrument. Almost immediately, a house-elf appeared near Sirius’ knee, proffering steaming glasses of a thick, dark liquid.

Sirius picked up two and handed one to James, sniffing his carefully. “Some sort of cider, I think.” He took a sip and then grinned. “But it’s got Firewhiskey. Okay, let’s pick a wall so we can plan out how to stay unnoticed. Not by the punch, that’s—”

“Potter! Black!” Even over the music, Slughorn’s voice rang out unmistakably. “How kind of you to make it!”

**xxx**

It took them a full twenty-eight minutes to disentangle themselves from Slughorn. James knew the time exactly, having checked his watch when Slughorn had pulled them authoritatively over to meet a cluster of Ministry wizards, and again when he’d finally waved them on with several admonishments to enjoy themselves.

“How did he know?” Sirius groused. “We weren’t here for even two seconds before he spotted us. Is there some sort of potion for that? Something that sharpens his senses, but only to notice people who want to avoid him? Hey, there’s Evans. We could ask her.”

The party had picked up further by then, somehow even more crowded than before. Attendees spilled out of the room into the corridor, but there still wasn’t enough room to move comfortably. James followed Sirius through the packed bodies (giving as much of a wide berth as possible to what looked suspiciously like a duo of vampires), and craned his neck to see if Morton stood with Lily. He wanted no surprises.

Morton wasn’t there, thankfully. Lily and Marlene huddled together alone, settled into a space where the sheer, silvery walls met in a corner. Even though they appeared deep in conversation, they broke off when they saw James and Sirius approach. It became apparent, the closer they got, that the girls had chosen their position well, as it offered a fairly clear view into a great chunk of the room.

Sirius noticed as well. “Excellent, excellent,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “Here, shove over, McKinnon. Let me watch the room with you.”

As Sirius maneuvered them around to maximize the space, James found himself standing next to Lily, and wondered if Sirius had intended it all along.

“Wait, what are you drinking?” Sirius continued before anyone could get a word in edgewise, even as Marlene had opened her mouth, clearly to protest the way he had put an arm around her shoulders to physically move her. He took hold of her squat, crystal goblet by putting his hand over hers and pulling it towards his nose. “Smells…spicy.”

“Could you not?” Marlene asked sharply, although her voice held no real aggression, and she pulled her hand back carefully. “Honestly, who raised you?”

“It’s port,” Lily said, and James could smell it too, dark and sweet, both from her glass and also somehow on her skin. “Supposedly from the Minister herself. Frank Longbottom brought it, said the Minister wanted to wish Slughorn a happy Christmas. And I’ve never seen him more thrilled. He insisted we toast with it right away.”

“We were over there with him for almost half an hour and weren’t offered a single thing,” James told them, still a little sore that Slughorn had managed to best their attempts to avoid him.

“Oh, we saw. We took bets on how long it would take Black to give up and just walk away. We figured he’d be the first to crack. But we somehow both lost the bet. You lasted longer than we expected.”

Sirius looked gratified at that, but quickly returned his attention to Marlene. “Let me try the port.”

“What? Are you mad? It’s mine.”

“You look nice,” James said to Lily, and he’d never meant it more. She wore dress robes in a bold, cool-toned red, and the color somehow made her hair look all the more brilliant, which she’d pinned atop her head to reveal the low cut of the back of her robes. Even though she stood half-facing him, he could see just enough of her exposed skin to remind him forcefully of the trail of freckles down her spine that he had admired the night he saw her with Morton.

They stood pressed so close together that James almost imagined that he could feel the heat of her skin where her bare arm pressed against the sleeve of his dress robes. When she smiled up at him, he watched as the faintest of dimples appeared in both cheeks, and he realized he’d never been close enough to her to notice them before. “Thanks,” she replied. “The credit goes mostly to Marlene, though. She fixed my hair.” He nodded in return, as if that meant anything to him.

She spoke in an entirely friendly manner. They’d come to an agreement in the past few weeks, it seemed, a mutual but unspoken ceasefire. Ever since their time spent in the kitchens after McGonagall’s scolding, Lily had seemed quite willing to talk to James whenever he engaged her, and once he realized that, he naturally did so as often as possible. He shamelessly sought out any excuse to talk to her anytime he could, and had taken to asking her questions about courses, sharing his thoughts about prefect duties, and throwing general jokes or comments at her to try to make her laugh, which he succeeded at an increasing rate. Neither of them ever mentioned anything about Morton—his pseudo-relationship with Lily, what James had seen, how Lily had purposefully lauded their intimacy in front of James’ face—and James found himself more relieved by that than anything. It felt good to simply talk to her about all sorts of little things. He found he could pass some joking taunt about her performance in Transfiguration, the subject that seemed to come the least naturally to her, and she would throw back, laughing, a jab at his struggles in Potions. He might catch her in the common room and tell her about a particularly troublesome student he’d encountered on patrol, and she’d ask him sit down with her to talk it through. And sometimes she even began these conversations herself, might ask him something passing about Quidditch in the corridor, and stop whatever she had set out to do to prattle aimlessly with him for a while. They had slowly become, to his intense surprise, not quite friends, but certainly very friendly.

Almost as if they’d overheard the quarrel for Marlene’s drink, a house-elf appeared near Sirius’ knee, carrying a heavily-laden tray of drinks. James stepped forward to take two glasses of wine, and put one in Sirius’ hand. “Here.”

“I’ll switch you,” Sirius offered to Marlene. With a pointed look, she polished off the port in her hand, probably at least a fourth of the glass.

“Do yours, so he won’t keep at this,” she told Lily, who, after a moment of thought, shrugged and complied. Marlene then switched out the empty glasses in their hands for fresh drinks from the tray. “Happy now, Black? We all have the same thing.”

“Sure,” Sirius said agreeably, waving an impatient hand. “It wasn’t really about the port, you know. It was about how wrong it was that you got rewarded for talking to Slughorn, and all I got was an earful about how I haven’t planned carefully enough for my future—as if he’s suddenly surprised about that now. He’s a little late, isn’t he? But whatever. No dates tonight? Or is Rooney around here somewhere, McKinnon?”

“He and Alex saw Catriona McCormack and went off to try to meet her.” Marlene looked faintly surprised. “How did you know I was here with Luke?” It took James a moment to recognize both Morton’s and Rooney’s first names, and he tried not to pull a face at the mention of the prior.

Sirius looked at her sharply, and then to Lily for confirmation. “Wait—McCormack, the Chaser who played for the Pride of Portree?” He and James exchanged an excited look. The Prides weren’t either of their preferred teams, but they had won the British and Irish League Cup twice in the 1960s, both times under McCormack’s leadership. Without so much as waiting for confirmation, Sirius lifted himself to his full height and began scanning the room.

“The same,” Lily said. She rolled her eyes. “They looked exactly like you two do now.”

“She’s a big deal. Do you know which way—wait. Evans, are you drunk?” James saw something, something in the pink of her cheeks and the softness of her eyes which, though not unfocused, looked somehow less intense.

The question managed to pull Sirius’ attention away from the prospect of meeting McCormack, at least momentarily. He dropped down, flat on his feet again, and cocked his head at her inquisitively. “You don’t drink,” he said, with at least a little accusation in his voice.

She held up her wine glass. “You’ve seen me drink. I had wine at Slughorn’s dinner party last month. You’re literally watching me drink right now.”

“Yeah, but—I distinctly remember fifth year, you took points away from us for drinking at one of our Quidditch victory parties after we beat, was it, Hufflepuff, maybe?” He looked to James for confirmation.

“That wasn’t because you were drinking. You lot started practicing dueling on the furniture!”

“You set a couch on fire,” Marlene added, and she looked as if she struggled not to smile.

Sirius looked surprised. “I did?”

“Well, one of you two did,” Lily said, and she gave them both a stormy look. “And it’s nice that you blame me. Remus absolutely backed me up. He was furious.”

“Oh yeah…” The memory came back to James in pieces. “It _was_ Hufflepuff, Sirius. Tight game, and we didn’t expect it, thought we had it locked down. I think we only beat them by fifty or sixty points.” And he could recall, now, Remus’ sheer, red-faced fury once he’d extinguished the blaze that had overcome the splintered remnants of one of the common room’s couches. “I don’t think Remus talked to us for a couple of days afterwards. That’s a while,” he added defensively at the looks he received from both Marlene and Lily, whose almost twin expressions made it clear that they thought they’d gotten off too easily.

Sirius smiled indulgently. “That’s right. That was a great game. I got their seeker, Hutchinson, square in the chest with a bludger, remember? Made him miss as he went for the snitch. Knocked him off his broom, and he fell, what, thirty or forty feet? It saved the game.”

“You’re terrible,” Marlene said flatly. “But no, Lily’s not drunk. I’m not either, Potter, although you didn’t ask. I know you’ve hardly noticed, but I’m here too.” James forced himself to meet the mocking sparkle in her dark eyes. She looked away first. “You are red, though,” she said, reaching out a hand to touch Lily’s flushed cheek, and James found himself unexpectedly very jealous of the ease with which Marlene could touch her.

“Oi, your boyfriend’s on his way over,” Sirius said suddenly. James wondered if he spoke more for his benefit than Marlene’s, as the moment he looked out to spot Rooney, he saw Morton as well. “Is he your boyfriend? James was pretty sure.”

“Yes,” Marlene said curtly, with none of her prior ease. She had gone a little pink herself, but looked distinctly pleased. “But it’s pretty recent. I’m surprised you noticed, Potter.”

“He’s observant,” Lily said, almost offhandedly. But James knew, from the way the corner of her mouth quirked, that she recalled, as he did, that she’d paid him an identical compliment when he’d revealed the armor secret passage to her.

“Did you meet Catriona McCormack?” Sirius asked the moment Rooney and Morton neared.

“Black, always good to see you,” Morton joked, and although he grinned amiably, perfectly innocuous, James felt an immediate stab of irritation at the sound of his voice.

“Yeah, hi, good to see you, how have you been, all that. Did you meet her?”

“Briefly, yeah. For all of one minute. Slughorn grabbed us almost as soon as we found her, dragged us over to talk to some of his old students, including that Healer from St. Mungo’s.” Rooney seemed to direct the last part exclusively to Marlene; clearly they had conversed about the topic recently.

“And?” she prompted expectantly.

“He was…fine.”

“Real dry,” Morton supplied helpfully.

“Real dry,” Rooney agreed. “Nice bloke, I’m sure, and we’re meant to meet up at the next Hogsmeade visit to talk about the Healing entrance exam. He seems helpful enough. But… Catriona McCormack, you know?” And James did know, identified with the wistful frustration in Rooney’s voice. He, too, would have rather talked to McCormack than any of Slughorn’s connections.

“What was she like?” Sirius demanded. “Did you ask her about the League Cup, the one in ’66, and the accusation of quaffle tampering the Prides made against the Arrows?”

Morton launched into a thorough overview of the short conversation. Sirius listened closely, closely enough that he didn’t seem to notice that Rooney managed to slip in between him and Marlene; in fact, Sirius stepped aside absently to make room for him.

James dipped his head towards Lily’s, close enough that he could smell her perfume, something soft and faintly sweet. “Are you here with him?” he asked quietly.

Lily tipped her head up, and the heat of the room seemed to swim to James’ head. She stood close enough that he could count every eyelash, and see each of the fine lines in her lips that she’d painted a cool red to match her robes, which she pressed together to hide a smile. “It’s absolutely not any of your business, but no.”

He believed her, sort of. But there was something about Morton’s face and his posture that had shaken the confidence James had felt an hour earlier, when he’d assured Sirius that there was no way Morton would escort Lily to the party. Even as he conversed with Sirius, Morton’s body remained turned towards Lily, perhaps unconsciously, and his eyes continued to flash towards her. James caught his gaze, once, and he and Morton observed each other for half a moment, before they both looked away. “Does he know that?” he asked Lily.

She laughed, then, and James felt more than one person turn to look at them, although he kept his eyes trained on her face. “He should,” she said simply.

He felt a brief flash of frustration. “Don’t be coy.”

“I’m not trying to be.”

“Right.”

“What? I’m not. I meant it. He should know.”

Did she really not see it? Maybe not. After all, James had only just realized that he had missed it too. In all the weeks he’d spent watching Morton and Lily together, he’d never seen Morton look at her quite as he did now. Their interactions had spanned a wide range, anywhere between friendly and scholarly in public to the private, frenzied passion he’d now witnessed twice. In public, every moment he’d seen between them—in classes, in prefect meetings, even occasionally in the corridor—came off as utterly polite and almost detached. But now, suddenly, James could see that Morton looked at Lily in the hazy golden light with the same sort of hopeless longing that echoed his own feelings.

Morton looked as if he _liked_ her, sincerely and genuinely, and past whatever they did in the dark, and James felt the already bad situation turn rapidly worse.

He swallowed the need to point these new findings out to Lily, along with most of his wine. He wanted to hear her refute them, or, better, say that even if James’ suspicions were true, it didn’t matter to her. Only the very real possibility that she might respond entirely differently, in a way he might not like, stopped him. “Well, if you’re not here with him,” he tried instead, “Do you want to take a walk with me? McKinnon’s right, you are warm.” Her cheeks had remained flushed, and the color spread rapidly to her exposed collarbone, but he wasn’t entirely sure if the heat he felt radiated from her or himself or both.

“No.” James felt his stomach drop in one quick, spectacular motion. “But ask me again later.” And there was potential in that, in the way that she said it, almost a command, and the way she looked up at him as she stifled another laugh, briefly biting the rim of her goblet.

“I’m going to,” he promised, grinning.

“You should.”

“Lily?” It was, of course, Morton.

She turned away from James, who realized suddenly that they had come to almost entirely face each other while they conversed, with her turned away from everyone else. Now as she twisted to look at Morton, he tried to ignore the clear view he had of the exposed skin of her back. Despite his best efforts, he still managed to count nine clear freckles across the base of her neck before it dawned on him that he’d never heard Morton call her by her first name before.

“You’re nearly out,” Morton said lightly, and there it was, again, the politeness from him that James had come to expect, as he held up his own empty glass. “D’you want to go try the punch? I was planning to head that way. Luke and I had some earlier and couldn’t figure out what was in it. Right?”

Rooney’s arm had disappeared behind Marlene, and from the way his shoulder moved, James assumed he had taken to stroking her back. “Yeah. Go give it a shot, potion’s master, and tell us,” he said to Lily with a smile. He spoke easily, but something about him, in his tone or his face or something else entirely, seemed off, although James couldn’t put his finger on exactly what. His tone reminded James of how he and his friends would ad lib to back each other up when under pressure to expand on a shaky story or explanation. He and Sirius bounced the best off each other, he’d often thought, and Remus could spin a yarn remarkably well, even though he didn’t like doing it. Peter still wavered a bit, but had grown at the skill out of time and necessity as they flouted rules through the years, and Rooney seemed at his level—not quite convincing, but not fully unconvincing in any discernable way.

“Alright. I’ll be back, if it matters,” Lily said to Marlene, with an amused glance at the way her friend’s shoulder fitted neatly into Rooney’s underarm, their sides pressed together.

“It matters,” Marlene assured her cheerfully, and James recognized, then, what looked off about Rooney’s face. While Marlene appeared open and carefree, something in Rooney’s expression—perhaps the twist of his mouth or the look in his eyes—had gone almost imperceptibly confused, or perhaps suspicious. James wondered, for the first time, how much Morton’s friends knew—or, for that matter, what Lily had told her own—about what went on between the two of them.

James watched as they left until he could no longer see them in the crowd, almost certain that Morton reached for Lily’s hand before they melted away.

“We should go too, make a lap, mingle,” Sirius suggested briskly. “We can try to find McCormack, see if we can ask her about the quaffle tampering.”

James nodded. “Yeah.” And he found himself adding to Sirius’ suggestion, to the story about what they would do, just as he had seen Rooney do for Morton. “Evans said something about Frank Longbottom, didn’t she? We should say hi. It’s been, what, two years now since he graduated?”

“Thanks, Black,” Marlene said dryly, and he gave her a grin and a short wave before taking off towards the center of the room. James followed him.

“I give them…six minutes before they’re back behind the curtains,” Sirius said, and he frowned. “Didn’t seem much point to stay and talk to them. I still think Rooney’s a right git.”

“He didn’t do anything.”

“Didn’t have to, did he? He’s just that kind of Ravenclaw. You know—thinks he knows a lot, lives in the library, would just as soon cut off his left nut than break a rule. And he’s friends with Morton, and that bloke is just smarmy.”

“You think?” James asked. The crowd seemed to thin a bit as they got closer towards the musician’s stage, and it became apparent why. A fine, purple smoke had begun to permeate the room, and became thicker as they neared the source. Slughorn stood nearby, bent over in conversation with the trio of elderly warlocks they had seen enter the party, the later three all smoking long, elaborately-caved pipes. James took a step back, worried Slughorn might spot them and pull them over, but he appeared entirely engrossed in his discussion with the warlocks, his face a cheerful, whiskey-soaked red, and he didn’t look their way.

“Yeah. Prongs, Morton is just… _about_ her.” Sirius seemed to not know how else to put it. “You should have seen him watch you talk to her.”

“I did, a little.”

“It’s weird, mate. Weirder, she didn’t even look like she wanted to kill you.”

“I honestly don’t think she did. I think we might be…almost friends.”

James found himself happy to have Sirius with him, because he couldn’t go running off to try to figure out where Lily and Morton had gone without explaining his actions. He knew Sirius expected him to suggest it, just as James knew it was a lost cause to even bring up. And somehow, that took some of the pressure off of his brain, just a bit, to know that he simply couldn’t follow her, even if he wanted to. He still, of course, kept an eye pealed at all times for any flash of the red of her hair or robes, but Sirius’ constant, cheerful chatter distracted him just enough that James found that he could enjoy himself.

They were Aurors now, the both of them, Frank and Alice explained, and they spoke about the profession with enthusiasm. James had questions, of course, and they seemed best put to such two such friendly faces.

Alice wore a ring on her left ring finger, he noticed, and the small stone twinkled as she twisted it mindlessly while she talked. “As long as your grades are good enough, the department will accept you,” she told James with reassuring warmth. He hadn’t known her as well as Frank during their time at Hogwarts, but, from the way she spoke to him, he’d almost forgotten that they weren’t the closest of friends. “There’s tests after that, on character and aptitude, to see how you respond under pressure. That’s where we watched a lot of people crack. But if you make it through, you’ll start training—mainly in magical combat, but also in concealment and tracking, healing, investigatory methods, all sorts of different things—which comes with its own difficulties. Most people who make it through the grades, and through the tests, fail out there. I won’t lie—it’s tough, and they don’t coddle, but they do try and help. Each trainee gets assigned to shadow an established Auror who aids in their training—Frank worked under Alastor Moody.”

Frank humbly waved away her unmistakable pride, and a grin split his face. “They also check your criminal background, don’t forget. I don’t think your record here counts, though.”

“It will if Filch has his way, I’m sure it will,” James said, and Alice and Frank laughed.

“No, you should be fine. Our records weren’t exactly clean.” Alice gave Frank a look, so warm and personal that James felt, briefly, like he and Sirius intruded upon something between them. “We used to get caught sneaking out quite a bit, and we were fine.”

Frank rubbed her shoulder. “That’s a right bit different than what these two have been up to, Alice, or at least were up to. Still are, I expect?”

Sirius shrugged modestly. “Oh, here and there. We try not to let things get too boring around here, but James is Head Boy now, so he’s gone rather dull.”

“You and Lily, Head Boy and Girl, huh?” Frank asked James with a knowing look.

James dropped his gaze. He hadn’t seen Frank since fifth year, and it felt embarrassing, just a bit, to get reminded that he’d already been so obvious about liking her, even then.

He tried his best to copy Sirius’ nonchalant shrug. “Yeah. McGonagall’s only gotten on us once for fighting, so we’re getting on okay.”

“I’m sure you started it. What did you do?”

“Blew up her binder and sent her notes flying everywhere,” James admitted, which was at least the partial truth. Even as he shifted uncomfortably at the memory, he couldn’t help but smile at Frank’s infectious laughter.

“She lovely, more so than I remembered,” Alice said firmly, a hint of reproach in her eyes, and Frank righted his face immediately, although with some difficulty. “I’ve missed seeing her. Slughorn had us talk to her earlier, said she was interested in Auror training. I think she’d do well. He seems to think so too—the way he goes on about her, you’d think she hung the moon.”

“A lot of blokes seem to think that,” Sirius said, and affected an almost convincing air of innocence when James shot him a look.

Not much later, after Alice and Frank had gotten pulled off elsewhere, Sirius and James began to return to the prime real estate near Marlene and Rooney when Sirius spied Lily and Morton. “Punch,” he said immediately after pointing them out. Although Lily and Morton didn’t stand near the bowl at all, James understood immediately. The punch bowl gave the perfect excuse, and vantage point, to linger nearby. James scooped up two glasses, and when Sirius tasted his, he rolled his eyes. “There’s clearly pumpkin juice in here. There, I solved the mystery. Couple of lying gits, and they’re not even good at it.”

James couldn’t help but feel vindicated that Sirius had noticed something weird about Morton and Rooney’s punch story as well.

“See, this feels less creepy than trying to catch them at foreplay in a corridor,” Sirius continued conversationally. “I mean, I do get it, Prongs. Didn’t mind seeing her like that after Slughorn’s dinner. Wouldn’t mind it again.”

“Padfoot.”

“Right. Are they fighting?”

It did, indeed, look like they’d caught Lily and Morton in the midst of a row, even as they clearly tried to disguise it. They stood near a wall some forty paces off, near several Ministry wizards, whose loud voices and bodies offered some cover. Morton’s face had gone fairly red, and Lily looked just as flushed as before, only now with all of the sharpness in her eyes, and not a playful sharpness, either. It gave James a certain amount of pleasure to see her look like that towards someone besides himself, and an even greater sense of satisfaction that it was Morton who sat on the receiving end of her wrath.

“Watch, watch—he’s going to try to touch her,” Sirius said gleefully, his own voice now instinctively quieter than before as he the two struggle with their own volume.

Sure enough, Morton’s hand had begun to move restlessly by his side. He lifted his arm, seemingly to reach for her cheek, but Lily smacked his hand away, and James recognized real intent behind the move, not at all good-humored as he’d seen in the past. She glanced quickly about them afterwards, as if she wondered if anyone had seen, and James had just enough time to worry that she’d spot them before she turned back to Morton, her face set.

Sirius began to laugh. “What do you think that was? A ‘don’t touch me in public’ kind of hit? Or a ‘don’t touch me at all’ one?”

It certainly looked like both.

“It’s brilliant when it’s not you,” Sirius went on, sounding almost affectionate. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s still kind of funny when it is you—she’s just so intense, look at her, she gets so wound up. But when it’s not you, it’s brilliant.”

“I’ve never seen her yell at anyone else,” James admitted. “Except the Slytherins, I guess.”

“They don’t count. Everyone should yell at them all the time.”

“I feel like I should break this up,” James admitted reluctantly, pointing as surreptitiously as possible at Lily’s wand hand, which flexed briefly once, and then again. “D’you mind, Padfoot? She did say earlier that she might take a walk with me.”

To his credit, Sirius looked genuinely delighted. “Did she, now? You didn’t tell me that!” He gave James a friendly shove in their direction. “Go on, get your bird. I’ll go find Frank, see if he feels like trying to break into Filch’s office with me.”

“He won’t.”

“Oh, I know, but it’ll be fun to try to convince him, and to watch Alice squirm. She’s too good for all of us, that one. Anyway, that’s where I’ll be, at least for a bit, if you strike out with Evans. But I’ll probably head back to the common room soon.” He returned James’ grin, and truly meaningfully, as if he understood the gratitude behind it at his understanding.

Morton and Lily spoke in voices so low that James couldn’t hear them until he was upon them, their words drowned out by the laughter of the Ministry wizards nearby. “Alright, Morton? Evans?” he asked, clapping Morton’s shoulder in a (hopefully) congenial matter.

With his back to James’ approach, Morton had jumped slightly at the words and touch, but managed his best attempt at a smile. “Yeah, ’course.”

James waited to see if he might try to explain away the obvious tension, curious what lie he could even come up with, but Morton didn’t bother to continue. “Well, I’ve lost the others,” James explained after a beat, as if somehow the six of them had become one large, happy group that evening. “Sirius is off with Frank Longbottom—Alice won’t be too happy about that, I expect—and I haven’t seen McKinnon and Rooney for ages, but that tracks—Sirius figured they’d disappear somewhere to snog before too long.”

Neither of them smiled.

“Anyway, Evans, do you want to go for that walk now?” James had considered, briefly, if he should try to use some sort of Head Boy and Girl excuse for pulling her away, but as soon as he saw her up close, he realized it didn’t matter what reason he gave. She looked entirely ready to get out of there.

“Love to,” she replied, and even though James knew that she didn’t direct the frost in her voice at him, he still flinched, unused to her using that tone with anyone else. “And then I think I’ll go to bed. ’Night, Morton.”

“’Night, mate,” James repeated, echoing her, and he clapped Morton on the back again. He didn’t even bother to hide his merriment. And he didn’t wait to hear if Morton replied, because he didn’t really even have time to—by then, Lily had somehow wound her way halfway across the room. He followed her quickly, and caught the briefest flash of a grin from Sirius, who stood by the door with Alice and Frank, before he caught up to her in the hallway.

She had waited for him, but clearly only just, as she took off like a shot the second she saw him. “I’ve honestly seen a snitch move slower,” James offered conversationally, doubling his steps to keep up.

“I’m sure.”

“Where are we going?” he asked, because the way that she stalked—angrily, but with purpose—seemed to imply that she had at least some idea.”

“Prefect’s bathroom.”

“Why?”

“I can’t go back to the common room yet and see everyone. Not when I feel like this. And I never go to the prefect’s bathroom, so he’s not likely to find me.”

“Do you think he would? Try to find you, I mean?”

She nearly walked past the statue of Boris the Bewildered. James reached out without thinking, taking her hand in his own to stop her, and found, immediately, that his heart seemed to flutter in his chest. She looked as confused as Boris beside her, but caught sight of the statue and understood quickly. “Oh.” Her hand left his to rest upon Boris’ head, although she didn’t need to touch the statue to reveal the entrance. “Hogmanay,” she said, and immediately slipped into the dimly-lit bathroom.

James hesitated, “Am I…?”

She looked back at him over her pale shoulder. “I expected you would,” she said, even as he left the question unasked. “I’m not actually here to bathe, Potter.” He ducked through after her, and watched as she pulled off her heels off one at a time. “I am putting my feet in, though. These are ridiculous.”

He followed her across the bathroom towards the swimming pool-sized bathtub, the soles of his shoes echoing in the silence, ears fairly ringing after the noise of the party. “Do you think he would try to find you?” he tried again as, and then wondered, belatedly, if maybe shouldn’t push the topic more.

She didn’t answer as she flipped open the taps and sat down at the tile’s edge. Pulling up the long skirt of her robes so it they billowed out above her knees, she dangled her bare feet and calves into the quickly-filling bathtub. She twisted one of the smaller taps nearby, and a powder blue, faintly sparkling bath foam, not dissimilar to fairy floss, gushed out. “Do you have a favorite bubble bath?” she asked, leaning to turn the tap next to that, which poured out glossy purple bubbles.

“No. I never come here either.”

“Really? Does anyone?” She looked up at him, then, lifting a bare leg and flexing her foot, with toes painted, he couldn’t help but notice, the same shade as her dress robes. “Are you going to sit with me?”

By the time he’d removed his shoes and socks and rolled his trousers to his knees, the water had risen far enough to cover her ankles. He hissed as he swung his own legs over the side, the temperature almost uncomfortably hot.

“I like it,” she said, even though he hadn’t complained. “And I don’t know. If he’d follow me, that is. I don’t know what he’s like after a row, because we’ve never had one before. He’s just…” She made a noise, the sort of scoffing sigh he’d heard directed his way all too often, and kicked at the water, splashing the wall on the far side of the room, just underneath the stained-glass window of a mermaid. “He’s _insufferable_.”

James couldn’t help but wonder how often she’d had this same conversation with her friends about him.

“It was weird, seeing you get mad at someone else like that.” The heat of the water had already begun to make him sweat, even as she still looked perfectly cool, at least physically. He pulled off his dress robe jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and magically turned the taps closed as the water neared the tub’s edge. “Sirius had a right fit from laughing. He saw you first, for the record. I wasn’t actually even looking for you this time, not really.” He wanted to head that question off before she could ask.

She waved a hand, and he couldn’t tell if she meant to dismiss his explanation or the slight apology in his voice. “Sure.”

“No, honestly. We’d just gotten done talking to Frank and Alice, and were trying to figure out where to go next where we could avoid Slughorn—”

“—as one does.”

“—as one does, yes. I was faced the wrong way, but Sirius saw and pointed you out. And then…well, then we watched you fight.” There was no denying that.

Her face went rather soft, then, entirely unexpectedly. “Frank and Alice are _so_ lovely,” she said, almost wistful.

“She said the same about you.”

This made her smile, some of her visible anger receding, though just barely. “Did you see how he looks at her?”

“I saw how she looks at him. It made me feel like I shouldn’t be there.”

“I know. To watch them together, it’s…it’s the best,” she said simply, as if she didn’t know how else to explain it, and somehow, he thought he almost understood. “They were like that in front of Slughorn, too, just so wrapped up in each other,” she added, and some of the tenderness left her face and voice, as if she’d caught herself. “He hardly knew what to do, but obviously felt uncomfortable and ended up just kept talking more.”

“Hard to believe that’s possible.”

Lily shifted, turning her torso so she could lean her back against one of the marble pillars that surrounded the tub, and she now faced him almost head on. “Alice and Frank have fought him, I think. You-Know-Who.”

James sat up straighter, staring at her. “What?” He’d never quite lost the mild feeling of unease that came when he was anywhere close to her, but now the sensation ramped up, tension on top of tension, enough to make his heart pound. “They _told_ you that?”

“Kind of.” She’d taken out her wand absently, and began to twirl it between nimble fingers. “I asked them if they thought that the Ministry had the manpower to counter what the _Prophet_ had stopped reporting.”

“You didn’t.”

She gave a small, satisfied smile. “I did. Well, Slughorn didn’t like _that_. He got all flustered, and immediately engaged Marlene in conversation with a witch nearby. Mar told me later that the witch was actually a reporter for the _Prophet_ , which Slughorn seemed to have forgotten because he was so desperate to get away from what I was saying. He went all pale, Mar said, like he expected her to ruin his party with the wrong questions, like I was, I guess, but she played nice. She’s capable of that sometimes, surprisingly.”

James laughed, despite himself.

“Anyway,” she continued, and now she seemed to be getting into the flow of the story, talking almost as much to herself as she was to him, “You should have seen Alice’s face when I asked that. She looks so sweet, you know—and she is, she hasn’t changed there a bit—but her whole expression darkened, and I’m sure that’s how she looks when she duels. Just…fierce. Frank kind of took ahold of her—he already had his arm around her shoulders, of course, but he used his other hand and took ahold of her arm, above the elbow, and just gripped her. There was just this…this energy between them, this heavy silence. I’ve never felt anything like it.”

She took a breath. “He’s more diplomatic than her, I think. He gave some classic line, you know, about how the Ministry always needs more talented witches and wizards, blah, blah, blah. But Alice—she reached up, and touched her neck. Her hair’s short—you saw—and I could see that where she touched, she had this scar down the side of her neck, real red and raised, like it was fresh. It disappeared into that weird ruff she was wearing, so I think it must have gone on longer. I don’t think the ruff went with her robes—the shades of green were just off between them, did you notice? I wonder if it just happened, if she just got injured and she didn’t have time to buy different robes before tonight, although…if it _did_ just happen, how crazy that they still came to the party.”

James reached over and took her wand out of her hands, just as one of the bubble bath taps near her burst open, pouring a fine, lilac glaze. He placed her wand next to her, and then leaned to manually shut the tap. “I saw it starting to turn when you were twirling your wand,” he explained. “But I wanted you to keep going.”

She had jumped when he’d reached for her, and now her collarbone gave the faint, wonderful flush he’d come to look for to recognize when she felt flustered. “Sorry.” Clearly moving her hands had become a compulsion. She began to take her hair down, removing one pin at a time, which she piled neatly next to her wand.

“Then what?” he prompted.

“It almost seemed like Alice wanted me to see it, the scar. When she saw that I’d noticed, she didn’t try to hide it at all, but kept her hand there. And she said…I don’t remember exactly, but something about how things would get worse before they got better, and becoming an Auror wasn’t something to take lightly. So I told them what I said to you and Black and Mar after Slughorn’s dinner last month, do you remember? I’m muggleborn, so there’s no way for me to stay neutral in this, even if I wanted to. They seemed to take that well. But Frank said something like, ‘Well, this profession would put a target on you further.’ And Alice said, ‘But blood stops meaning as much when you start to fight against him. He’ll come after you just the same.’ And she said his name then. You-Know-Who’s. I hadn’t heard it in so long that it shocked me.”

The color had left her face again.

“And Frank said, real quick, just to her, ‘But we’ll be fine,’” Lily continued, although her tone started to change, to slow in pace, the story clearly almost over. “Slughorn pulled me away pretty quickly after that, but it seemed like Frank didn’t want to dwell on it anymore anyway. I doubt I would have gotten more out of them. But there was…there was something so personal about the way Alice said it. ‘He’ll come after you just the same.’ Like she knew.”

James found, rather dully, that his conversation with Tiller—over how to avoid the Slytherin Quidditch team’s propensity for blagging—suddenly felt so unimportant, and very far away.

“Alice said you’d do well,” he offered after they sat for a few moments, the room silent save for the faint hiss of popping bubbles. It felt like a small comfort he could offer her, if a comfort at all. “When I talked to them. About being an Auror, I mean.”

She smiled at him, and plucked the last pin out of her hair. James watched as it tumbled down around her face, and thought she’d never looked more beautiful.

“Is it still your plan?” she asked.

“What?”

“You wanted to be an Auror, didn’t you?”

He looked at her oddly. How did she know? Had he told her?

She read his expression. “You said it once. Not this year, I don’t think—it must have been ages ago.”

“Why would you remember that?”

“I don’t know. Probably because it was also my plan, at least once I realized I didn’t want to pursue Curse-Breaking. Arithmancy is just so _dull,_ even if it is dead useful, and that’s all Curse-Breaking is, really.”

He nodded slowly, undeniably flattered. She had listened to him, it seemed, even when she’d hated him. (Did she hate him still? Their interactions felt like companionship, and a relatively easy companionship at that, but the question still plagued him constantly.) And she’d committed something he’d said to memory, something that wasn’t some horrible insult he’d hurled at Snape or some pigheaded way that he’d asked her out, even though both events made up the majority of their interactions before seventh year. “Yeah. It’s always been my plan. I mean, I’d like to play Quidditch all my life, ’course. But I’d rather to do something that matters, I think.”

“You don’t fly well enough for professional Quidditch,” she said, and he laughed, both at her taunt, and at the way she’d been unable to stand the tension in a reminded him fondly of Sirius.

“How would you know?” he asked. “Do you even go to games?”

“Of course. All of them. I was there when we played Slytherin last month. You did well.” She sighed as soon as she said it, although she didn’t seem truly put out. “Don’t look like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like that just went entirely to your head.” She bent down, dipping her arms into the thick bubbles to rub at her calf. “I’m sorely tempted to get in.”

Something about the way she said it sounded more like a warning than a wish. “Is that a hint?” he asked uncertainly. “Should I leave?”

She seemed to consider it, or at least to sit long enough in silence for him to grow even more uncertain, more uncomfortable. “No, you’re fine,” she said finally, and leaned back, groping for her wand, bubbles trailing from her bare arms. She shortened the length of her robes, so that the hem now sat where she currently had it lifted, and slid into the water.

He hadn’t expected her to take her robes off. Not really. But he still felt kind of disappointed when she hadn’t.

Her head disappeared under the thick bubbles, and when she resurfaced several moments later, she came up across the length of the tub. “You can get in, if you want,” she said, almost expectantly.

He froze midway through scratching his cheek. “Evans.”

“What?” And for once, she didn’t look like she was toying with him. She genuinely seemed to not understand.

“Come off it. I’m not getting in a bathtub with you.”

“Why—oh, Christ, the tub is big enough! You don’t have to come anywhere near me!”

He reached up to rub his forehead, exasperated. Even when she got it, she didn’t _get_ it. “But I’d want to. And—well, I’m impulsive, remember?” She rolled her eyes, and he added, defensive despite himself, “I don’t think you understand what it’s like for me. Being around you.”

She stared at him, considering. “Oh.” There must have been something about him—something in his voice that he didn’t hear, or something on his face that he couldn’t control—that made her dive back under the water.

His ears burned. Still, when she kicked her legs to propel her body further beneath the suds, she shot a whole face and lapful of water at him with what felt like great purpose. It made him feel, strangely, somewhat better. At least she hadn’t pitied him enough to stop teasing him. He already knew that he’d miss it if she ever did.

When she resurfaced, they didn’t talk for a long while, and James found himself more comfortable in the silence than he would have imagined only two months—or even two weeks—earlier. He spent a bit of time cleaning the soap off his glasses (it took two _Scourgify_ charms and a considerable amount of elbow grease), and then watched her swim laps, and if she noticed he watched, she didn’t say anything. Eventually, Lily returned to his side of the tub and propped her arms up over the side, holding herself up enough to float gently.

“Evans?”

“Hmm?”

“Why were you and Morton fighting?”

She looked up at him, her cheeks pink from the warm water, hair darker and redder and slicked back across her head, mouth still the almost obscene cherry red he’d noticed hours before, lipstick held neatly, magically, in place. “Oh. _That_.” She didn’t need to ask him who he meant. “You don’t want to hear about it. No, wait, you probably do,” she corrected before he could even open his mouth. “But what if I don’t want to talk about it?”

“Well…then you don’t have to. Obviously.”

She thought for a moment, and then shook her head before he could feel like an even bigger prat for pushing her. “It’s fine. There’s not much to tell. I don’t even really know what happened?” The fact came out more inquisitive than assertive, as if she still questioned the fight, and, further still, questioned why she couldn’t figure it out. “Morton pulled me, you saw, and I was kind of annoyed, because Marlene and Rooney don’t know—”

“Wait, really?” Rooney he’d figured, maybe, but Marlene?

“No. At least, unless he’s told Rooney lately, but I think I’d know pretty quick. You saw Rooney tonight—he’s not a great liar. And besides, he’d tell Marlene, and she’d tell me. We don’t have secrets.”

“Except this, apparently.”

“Well, fair.” She paused, and for a second she looked like she doubted her own logic, but then roused herself quickly and the expression left. “But Marlene’s fancied Rooney for ages, since fourth year, so I made Morton promise when we started that we wouldn’t tell either of them, in case it made things weird.”

“How—”

“—did Morton and I get started?” she finished for him, her tone suddenly sharper, and he wished he hadn’t started the question even as he nodded. “Potter, under the list of things that aren’t your business, that’s definitely near the top. You know, I shouldn’t even talk to you about any of this, but I figured, that, well, you were there tonight, and got me out of there before I really started yelling, so I kind of owed you an explanation about—”

He cut her off. “You’re right. Don’t tell me. But it’s not like I haven’t wondered, and sometimes it feels like you’re still fucking with me—no, honestly, it feels like you’re still fucking with me _all the time_. Sometimes you’ll drop things, just little hints of things, and it seems like they’re things you _know_ that I want to know, but then you get mad when I ask.”

When she didn’t immediately snap back with something, some way to flip the problem on him, he wondered, for the first time since the party, if she’d had more to drink than he’d previously thought.

“That’s kind of fair,” she said, and now he felt sure that she wasn’t entirely herself. _“Kind of_ ,” she stressed. “Don’t look so shocked.” She tipped her head back under the water, and he watched while she smoothed her hair back again, her exposed throat seeming to fairly glow in the chandelier’s dim candlelight. “Morton and I both became prefects fifth year,” she explained, lifting her head back up. He tried not to notice the fresh beads of water that slid down her neck. “Is that enough to make sense?”

“No, but I can pretend.”

“You could ask Frank and Alice. The same thing happened to them.” Seeing that cleared up nothing further—that, if anything, it only confused James more—she sighed. “Frank was Head Boy then, and Alice was the seventh-year Gryffindor female prefect—Hortensia Layton from Ravenclaw beat her out for Head Girl, although I still don’t know how. But Alice and Frank used to spend all kinds of time together, even before they started dating, because they were prefects together. We used to tease her about it. After he became Head Boy, Frank would always assign them to patrol together, Alice would offer to go with him when he’d reset the castle passwords each month—”

“Wait, are we supposed to be doing that?”

“Well, the seventh-year prefects are in charge of their own common rooms, so people like you can’t get into, say, Slytherin’s house, because who knows what chaos you’d cause there. But there’s a certain number of passwords we’re supposed to set, yes.”

“How much work do you do without telling me?” he asked, fully aware that this was a problem that might not have bothered him the year before, and definitely not any of the years before that. He’d never given much thought to skivving off a group project, or taking advantage of anyone’s labor. But it didn’t bother him that he was taking advantage of Lily’s labor, exactly, although the fact that it was her—and what she must think of him—did make it worse. No, much of his concern stemmed from the nagging feeling he’d been wrestling the entire term—that there was a lot more to this whole Head Boy business than anyone had told him. He knew he probably looked well stupid because he didn’t do what was expected of him, which bothered him just slightly more than the overwhelming feeling that he just couldn’t crack the job right. “Wait—will you tell me later? Tell me about Frank and Alice.” Some of the bubbles, he realized, had started to recede—not much, but just enough for the tops of her shoulders to peak though. He didn’t look forward to the idea of being able to see her in the water—although, at the same time, he looked forward to it very much.

“There’s really not much else. Just…when you’re around someone constantly, some things just…happen. That’s what happened with Frank and Alice. I doubt they would have gotten together if they hadn’t spent all that time together as prefects, and then more when he became Head Boy. And that’s what happened with Morton and me. We got assigned patrol duty on the same night all the time, and he started offering to do a floor with me, or I’d show up to relieve him and he’d stay a while. And then eventually, after several months, it just…happened.”

James felt, quite suddenly, like hitting something. He took off his perfectly clean glasses, just to occupy his hands, and polished them on his robes. “How’d he swing it?” He hoped his voice sounded as even as hers.

“Sorry?”

“How’d he swing it? Frank was scheduling, right? Because he scheduled Alice with him so they could shag.”

“I don’t know if they—”

“Evans. You saw them tonight. You know that they did.” She didn’t argue there. “But how did Morton manage all those _cozy_ patrol sessions?” There it was—his bitterness peaked through at the end.

She had to have heard it in his tone, but made no comment. “I expect he got Layton to assign him the times he wanted us both to have. She and Frank set the schedule together. You know, she was the Head Girl, and she was in Morton’s house and they were relatively friendly, so it makes sense that he talked her into it. But he’s never told me. I’ve never asked.”

When he put his glasses back on, he saw that she’d rested her cheek on her folded arms, her head tilted to look at up him. She looked tired, and he suddenly felt the pressing weight of the entire night hit his body. He had no idea what time it was. “Tell me about tonight, and then we should go. You can’t fall asleep like that.”

She didn’t disagree. “It’s stupid. What happened tonight.”

“Lay it on me.”

“Okay, just—oh, you’re going to get such a big head.” She sat up, ignoring his surprise, and no longer looked drowsy, just—by the set of her jaw—annoyed. “Everything was fine at first, and Morton and I were just talking, like we do when Marlene and Rooney are there—just stuff about courses, or about Christmas break, or whatever. Usually we’re never alone together for Slughorn’s little Slug Club nonsense, because it’s just dinners or drinks or something in a large group. And last year, we—” She stopped abruptly, and leaned to the side to wring the water from her hair. “We just didn’t stay long for last year’s party.”

James decided immediately, based on how casual she tried to sound, that he didn’t want to know anything more about that, even though, at the same time, he absolutely did, a craving that made him feel a bit ill.

“And it was just bloody awkward tonight,” she went on a little too quickly, and he was grateful she didn’t linger so he could push past those thoughts. “I didn’t understand why we were having this innocent chat by ourselves, instead of with Marlene and Rooney, so they wouldn’t get suspicious, because they just got together at the beginning of November and I was so pleased about that and didn’t want to ruin anything, and—Potter, don’t you _dare_ laugh.”

He’d been trying so hard to follow her increasingly rambling sentences that the sound of his own name startled him. “What?”

“Say you won’t laugh.”

“Okay?”

She took a deep breath, and then closed her eyes. “We were talking perfectly normally, and then he just…lost his head a bit. About you.”

For one delicious moment, time seemed to stand still.

And then, James couldn’t help it, he laughed.

“I’m sorry, I really am, Evans, I swear!” he exclaimed immediately, but he couldn’t help himself, he couldn’t stop. He did his best to dodge the splash she sent his way, shoved harsh and fierce with both hands. While most of the water missed him, save for the left sleeve of his shirt, his jacket behind him got soaked. “I’m not laughing at you!”

“You’re laughing at my misfortune, which is enough, especially after you said you wouldn’t!”

“I mean, I didn’t know what I agreed to, but—it’s just so funny, because do you know how jealous I’ve been of that bellend, and for _months_ now? And I haven’t done anything about it, but he sees us talking one time and, what, he just can’t take it?”

She hoisted herself out of the tub suddenly, back to the ledge where she’d previously sat, and he stopped laughing immediately. He didn’t stop because he worried she might leave—that idea came to him later, and he was surprised, in hindsight, that she hadn’t. No, he fell silent at the sight of her, which he’d longed for and dreaded to see since the moment she’d gone into the water. He had just enough time to take in a few minute details—the sheen of her skin, the way a patch of light blue bubbles slid slowly down the length of her neck, how the sodden fabric of her robes clung to her and bunched a bit around her hips, revealing the muscle of her outer thigh that he’d so admired—before he reached for his wand and summoned a towel, which flew at her with alarming speed.

She caught it just before it hit her face, and set to drying her hair.

He summoned a second towel, this time to himself, and tossed it over her lap.

She smiled at him, all winning charm. “Thanks.”

“You’re cruel,” he said, because she _knew_.

“Probably. Are you done?”

It took him a second to remember what they had even been talking about. When it dawned on him, he grinned again, despite the heated twist in his stomach that continued as he looked at her, and made sure to very pointedly not laugh. “Sure, yeah.” He summoned his own towel, and then pulled his legs out of the water and turned to entirely face her as he dried off. “Tell me what he said.” He leaned forward, already engrossed, any pretense of not caring—if it had ever existed—now fully out the window.

She rolled her eyes. “No. Grow up.”

“Evans, I spent the last three Defense lessons trying to work out how I could get away with hexing him, and that’s after not seeing you anywhere near him for weeks. I still just hate his stupid face, and I hate being anywhere near him, and now that we’re finally back to dueling in Defense, it really seems a perfect opportunity to get him.” He knew he should be embarrassed, but he found that he really no longer cared, because _Morton_ was somehow jealous of _him_. The knowledge was too delicious for anything else to matter. “I know I can’t pair up with him, because Sirius and I always team up together and that would look weird, if I suddenly suggested it. But I think if we’re near each other but on opposite sides of the room, I could easily hit him and, with all the chaos around, he’d just figure it was Rooney with a few really good shots, you know? I just don’t know how many times I could get away with it, so I’m trying to time it out and see what he’s particularly bad at—and what Rooney’s good at—to make it look convincing. I have spent a solid six hours in class trying to figure it all out. _Let me have this_.”

He wasn’t sure what he expected—maybe for her to laugh, or to argue, or to say that, if he had outlined his plans to embarrass himself enough to cancel out any humiliation she felt at his laughter, that tactic didn’t work all the time. But she just sat there for a while, and watched him impassively, still toweling her hair. “Okay,” she finally agreed.

“Tell me what he said.”

“Well, it wasn’t particularly interesting—will you just listen?” she asked irritably, some of the color coming back to her voice, as he’d started to interrupt. “I was going to say that it wasn’t particularly interesting _at first_. Bit uninventive, really. He just repeated the usual stuff, the things I’m sure everyone has heard me say about you.”

“I’m sure I know, but tell me anyway.”

“Oh, just—you know, he said that you’re arrogant and you’re rude and you don’t think about anyone but yourself, and that you can be needlessly cruel to anyone you think is below you, which is almost everyone. Those things.” She paused. “He did add, though, that you’re not that great of a Chaser, which, before you ask, no, I haven’t said to anyone despite that I said it to you earlier, so he’s not just repeating that from me.”

He stared, indignant. “But—we always beat Ravenclaw!”

“I know that! And I told you, that’s not something he got from me! Lord, Potter, it’s like you’re more concerned that he doesn’t think you’re a walk on for the Wasps next year than that he thinks that _you’re_ the bellend!”

“Well, the rest of what he said can be true, can’t it? I’ve been like that sometimes, often a lot.” Her face softened a bit, almost imperceptibly. “What?” he asked, confused.

“Nothing,” she said quickly, quicker than he’d expected. She took a deep breath, and launched back in. “I told him—well, I told him that wasn’t really fair.”

James couldn’t help it. He gave a delighted, whooping laugh, and then immediately brought his fist to his mouth. “Sorry. Continue. Just imagining his face.”

“I told him that you hadn’t anything to warrant any of that tonight—and hadn’t in a while, actually. And I said that the Quidditch stuff was especially unwarranted for him to say at all, any day, because, well, we _do_ always beat them.”

“Cheers, truly.”

She glanced at his grinning face, but then looked away, although the corners of her mouth twitched. “He definitely didn’t like that,” she said mildly. She pulled her legs out of the water and tucked them beside her, rearranging the towel across her lap as she did moved. “He said some other stuff, like that you’re a shit Head Boy—”

Honestly, James thought, justified.

“—and that he had no idea how you got the position—”

Justified too.

“—and when I told him that obviously Dumbledore thought you were the right fit for the job, well, he didn’t like that either. But then he just got so weirdly… _personal_?” Again, her incredulity colored her words so that it came out as more of a question than a statement. “He said it was obvious that you still fancied me, which he thought was…well, he used the word pathetic. But then he said—and he repeated this two or three more times, it’s what he kept coming back to, so obviously mad—he said that he doesn’t make me _laugh_ like you do, and that’s all I do in prefect meetings anymore.”

James stared, and the happiness that beat in his chest now seemed to hum. “Oh _really_ now?”

“So I told him—” Lily sat up straighter, color again flooding her cheeks, and she reminded James forcefully of the palpable anger he’d seen her vent towards Morton. He wondered, briefly sympathetic, how the poor bloke had made it out alive, unused to such treatment from her—he had grown used to her rage, after all, but he still didn’t like it. “I told him that I didn’t know he had ever tried to make me laugh, unless what he had just said was some sort of joke, and that, if so, he still wasn’t funny.”

“Evans?” he asked, and he waited until she turned to look at him before he continued. “That’s honestly my favorite thing you’ve ever said.”

She pulled the towel from her hair and threw it at him, but he caught it effortlessly. “Well, it was mean, and it still feels mean, but I meant it. He’s never tried to make me laugh, so I don’t understand this ridiculous…well, jealousy, it seemed like. I mean, sure, he and I banter, but it’s like I would with Remus, you know?”

“Don’t compare him to Remus.” It came out terser than he’d intended.

She lifted an eyebrow, but acquiesced with a nod. “Well, I kind of went off like that for a while. I told him what I just said—he’s never tried to make me laugh. That’s not who we are when we’re together. And I also told him kind of what you said earlier—that he could hardly get mad because I had at a single, brief conversation with you tonight. But he said again that, apparently, you and I do this all the time in prefect meetings, where you’ll make jokes and I’ll laugh, and I won’t get mad that you derail things. Which I don’t think is true. I mean, I do laugh, but we’re always very much on track.”

“You would know. You have the notes. I’ve seen them.” He left unsaid, of course, that he’d last seen them after he’d scattered them around the floor of the Transfiguration classroom, but knew she understood when she laughed. Somehow, he decided, he liked when she laughed at his jokes even better now, now that he knew Morton hated it.

“Is this getting tedious?” she asked. “I can—”

“You know the answer is no. Again, let me have this.”

She began to pull her fingers through her hair, and James watched her, remembering the way she’d gone through the same motions right before she’d left the classroom with Morton that first night. He wondered what the habit meant. “I’m almost done anyway, because it kind of devolved from there because I got so mad, mainly because he was criticizing the way I’m running things as Head Girl. When I told him that, he tried to backtrack and say that he hadn’t meant that, just that he thought it was weird that you and I suddenly got on so well. He asked if there was anything ‘dodgy’ going on between us.” She scoffed. “‘Dodgy,’ verbatim. I don’t know where he got that from, because he doesn’t really know that we—”

James watched her break off, gesturing between the two of them, clearly searching for however she meant to describe whatever it was they were doing in that moment, whatever it was that they had done in the kitchens, whatever it was that they now did whenever he could catch her during classes, in the corridors, in the common room at night. He waited a beat and then two, desperate to hear her finish, so he could know how she saw them, but also desperate to get her to stop talking, afraid the answer would disappoint him entirely. “We talk,” he finally supplied helpfully, and she looked grateful.

“Right. We talk, but he doesn’t know that. I never told him that you saw us together, and I don’t even know how I’d go about explaining _that_. So he’s basing all this off, what, our weekly prefect meetings, if you and I say anything to each other in classes, and you and I talking tonight? I told him there wasn’t anything ‘dodgy’ happening, but that even if there _was_ , it wasn’t his business, because he and I are not dating, and that’s when he apologized. You showed up right after. And now…I guess now you can laugh. Go ahead.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he assured her, but he had to rub his face to try to keep his grin contained. “The timing on my part, though, showing up then—impeccable.”

“I once said you somehow always manage to be in always in the right place at the right time.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t mean it. And this time it’s actually true. I bet he’s having a fit right now.” As if the night could get sweeter.

“He might not be. We’re not dating, so he shouldn’t care that I left with you.” He couldn’t tell if she believed what she said, or if she just wanted to believe it. 

But he doubted her assessment. “Well, we’ll see.” He watched her lift her arms above her head, stretching, as she stifled a yawn. “Bed?” he asked, even though he no longer felt tired. He would have a hard time resisting the urge to wake Sirius up to tell him all of this, even though he knew that he shouldn’t, knew that he should keep the evening to himself.

“Mmm.” Lily sat motionless as he rolled down his trousers and put on his shoes and socks, and only then did she stand up, and reluctantly. “I’m just going to go up in a robe,” she said as she bent to pick up her wand and then her hair pins. James summoned a robe, warm from a heating spell probably cast by some house-elf. She only succeeded in picking up four or five of the pins before she clearly deemed the task not worth it, and vanished the pile entirely before she straightened up.

“Here.” James didn’t think about his actions, not really, not until he’d already unfurled the robe and stepped forward to drape it around her shoulders. And suddenly, as he looked down at her, she was all she could see, all he could sense. Placing the robe about her, one of his hands swept across the long, damp hair she’d pulled over one shoulder, even as his other hand brushed against the side of her neck. The chill in her hair versus the heat in her skin seemed to shock him, and it sent his heart hammering. Even though he’d long since grown used to the perfume of the bath, he felt sure he could now smell the bubbles still clinging to her skin, strong and heady, almost overwhelming. She looked up at him, and he thought she only looked surprised for a second, before he could swear that her eyes began to blaze.

He pulled himself back, but not until he’d already given each of her shoulders a quick, panicky pat that he regretted immediately. His face was on fire. “You go first,” he told her after clearing his throat. “I’ll wait a bit, so no one sees. And clean up.”

She hung back only a second, hardly long enough for her to tie the robe around her waist and pick up her shoes, both of which she did without faltering on her way out the door. He didn’t manage to see her face at all. “’Night,” she called, and she left, her bare feet silent on the tile.

Once the statue closed, James sank to a nearby bench. He sat there for a bit after she left, unable to muster up even the energy for the most rudimentary of spells.

But he rose, eventually, and vanished the water from the floor. As he watched the bathtub drain, just as alarmingly fast as it had filled, the swirling water sent a fresh burst of the scent of bubble bath towards him, and it smelled like Lily.

He felt faintly sick.

When he exited out from behind Boris the Bewildered, the corridor felt as if it had been dark and silent for a while; apparently Slughorn’s party had already broken up and the stragglers had long since left. His eyes didn’t even have time to adjust before he heard Lily’s voice. At that moment, to hear her voice seemed bad enough; his spirits only plummeted further when he heard Morton’s join her.

“…I don’t care how ‘distinct my magic’ is, it’s entirely inappropriate and honestly a gross misuse of a spell,” James heard her hiss from somewhere to beyond the bend in the corridor, towards the Grand Staircase. He could see, faintly, the outline of their shadows.

He hesitated. The tapestry of Mungo Bonham sat not ten yards away, in the opposite direction from where Lily and Morton presumably stood. The passage only went down to the fourth floor, but he could take it, he reasoned, and then he could head to the passage beside the armor and take that up to the seventh floor. He’d planned to take the armor passage, anyway, just to join it from this floor, but the entrance sat further down the corridor, past where Lily and Morton quarreled.

He had an escape route, one he could take immediately. He didn’t need to listen.

But he did.

“You’re right. I just meant it as in, I knew the spell picked up you and not anyone else, so I wasn’t just tracking everyone around here.” Morton’s words came out rushed, less composed than James had ever heard him.

“Oh yes, I’d hate for you to violate anyone else’s privacy,” Lily shot back. “Just mine is fine. That’ll do, Alex. Great job.”

James realized he’d never heard her call him Alex before, only his surname. He didn’t like it.

“You’re right,” Morton said again. “I just wanted to tell you that I was sorry. I figured you and Potter might have gone to your common room, but in case you hadn’t…I just wanted to check, and I wasn’t sure how else to find out. It’s not an excuse, and I don’t mean it as one.”

“Really? Because it sounded like an excuse. It _still_ sounds like one.”

“Will you just—will you let me apologize?” For the first time, Morton sounded, if not mad, at least something other than pleading.

“Go ahead.”

“I’m sorry for what I said earlier, all of it. I was a right prick, and you didn’t do anything to deserve it.”

“All of it?” she repeated. “ _All of it_? You don’t just get to question my capabilities as Head Girl—”

“Will you stop?” Morton whispered fiercely as her voice loudened, cutting Lily off so suddenly that James wondered, for a moment, if he’d cast a silencing charm on her, or gone the old-fashioned route of placing a hand over her mouth. “If Filch is around, he _will_ hear you, and he’s not going to believe that we’re both patrolling when you’re in a bathrobe!”

Silence followed, for several moments long enough that James wondered if they had left or—now he felt even sicker—were snogging.

Why hadn’t _he_ kissed her, when she’d looked up at him like that in the bathroom, like she so clearly wanted him to?

“Fine,” he heard Lily say, finally, and he relaxed, just slightly, at how unmistakably mad she still sounded. Her tone of voice, he reasoned, killed any potential that they’d been snogging. “You have five seconds, and then I’m leaving.”

“How did I question you as Head Girl?”

“You really don’t get it? Fine. That’s close enough to five seconds. Goodnight.”

James thought he saw the shadows move, although they lengthened, as if Lily and Morton moved further away from him.

“I didn’t say anything like that!”

“Really? You definitely made it pretty clear that, what, all I do in meetings is giggle at Potter’s jokes? How else am I supposed to take that, other than to assume that you think that the real joke here is the way I act as Head Girl?”

“Oh.” As he sighed, Morton somehow made the single exhale sound like the most relieved noise James had ever heard. And with that relief, came new confidence. “That wasn’t what I meant.”

“Sure it wasn’t.”

“Honestly. I—that wasn’t intended at you. That was about Potter, and the way he acts in meetings.”

“Like that makes it better?”

“I mean, doesn’t it a little?”

“I don’t know why you’re going on about him. He hasn’t done anything to you.”

“Okay, maybe not tonight, but…I mean, how often have I heard you complain about him? How many times have I seen him act the exact way you’ve complained about? He and his friends—”

“I don’t want to hear it. You’re just going to repeat yourself. I’m going to bed.” The shadows lengthened a bit more.

“How am I supposed to take this,” Morton asked defensively, “As anything but you getting mad that I’m talking badly about Potter? I don’t know why you’d defend him if there’s really nothing going on between you two. Because tonight it looked like something was, and you need to tell me if you two are—well, if you’re—”

“Will you get _off_ of that? Fucking hell, I don’t know how else to explain this to you. There’s nothing ‘dodgy’ between me and Potter. I’m not mad because you suggested it—although, no, I am a little mad about that, because means you think I’m up to something with him while I’m carrying on with you. So really, Alex, what the fuck? Is that what you think of me?”

“Lily, that’s not how I meant it.”

“I don’t care. What makes me the maddest, really, is that when you insult him, for _any_ way he’s acted in prefect meetings this year, you’re also insulting me as Head Girl. You’re implying that not only did I let him act that way, but that, what, everyone sees me as some giggling idiot? How else am I supposed to take that other than an insult towards me and everything I’ve worked for to become Head Girl?”

“I—”

“As for the rest of it, that doesn’t matter to me. You can insult him all you want, and you can insult his friends too—except Remus, who you know, and you know he is lovely. Don’t just lump him in there. But from my end, right now, I can’t see a thing any of them have done to you to make them insult them, other than Potter and Black acting fairly polite tonight, all things considered. Just…” She took a deep breath. “ _Leave it_ tonight, will you? We can talk about this later. Even if you still think you’re right, we can argue about it then. But I’m just done for now. I’m done.”

“Done just for now?”

“Sure. Well—I don’t know. We’ll see. _Goodnight_.” This time it sounded like she finally got away.

Although he couldn’t see him, as James slid behind the tapestry of Mungo Bonham, he gave the wizard a little pat, feeling rather fond of him. His heart, now, seemed light again, lighter than in ages.


	6. Chapter 6

“I was thinking,” James said casually, “That I might not go home for Christmas.”

Sirius and Peter halted their game of chess, a match that Peter—to his great pride—currently led, his queen on a trail of hot pursuit after Sirius’ king. Sirius looked hardly concerned at the state of the game, but made sure to offer several loud objections every time Peter took a piece—more to cheer his friend on rather than to truly complain, James thought. In contrast to their curious, expectant faces, Remus didn’t bother to look up from his book, although he did raise his eyebrows, clearly listening.

“Did exams melt your brain?” Sirius asked.

“It could be a Time Turner issue,” Peter suggested. “Like we’re back in time, what, two weeks ago, when we all signed up to go home?”

Sirius prodded his remaining rook forward in a valiant attempt to close in on Peter’s queen. “Could be both, if you think about it. I mean, what reason is there to change plans now?” Peter’s knight swooped down to take the rook, and Sirius swore so spectacularly that half the common room turned to look at them.

“I have a few reasons, actually,” James said, frowning, no longer quite so casual.

“And I want to hear them, Prongs, I really do,” Sirius assured him, with all of his customary cheer. “Just wait a bit so Wormtail can put me out of my misery, will you? He has…” He considered the board carefully. “Well, I think he’ll take it in four moves.”

“Three,” Peter corrected, and he kept his word, his face a delighted shade of pink.

“Good show, good show,” Sirius said as his king threw his small, ivory crown at the feet of Peter’s queen. He stood, stretched, and levitated his armchair next to James’, where it had sat before he’d rousingly challenged Peter to a game of chess. They played regularly, and Peter won nearly half the time—and genuinely, James thought, because Sirius wasn’t the type to throw a game, even for a friend. Still, Sirius didn’t seem to mind losing, maybe because Peter so clearly liked winning. He threw himself back into his chair and leaned forward, towards James. “Go ahead, then. Make your case. Wait—Moony, put your book down. Don’t you want to hear this?”

“Sure, just give me a minute. Almost done with this chapter.”

James tilted his head to read the worn gold lettering along the book’s spine. _“Hippocrates’ Help: 1001 Healing Charms,”_ he read aloud. “Don’t you know a lot already?”

“Sure, but nothing musculature. My hip hurt for ages last month after…” Remus glanced around the packed common room, choosing his words carefully, “After my furry little problem. It would be nice to be a little more prepared this time.”

“You can’t lay off one night?” Peter asked. “I don’t know how you can even look at words right now. McGonagall and Flitwick giving exams on the same day—”

Remus turned a page and lowered his book, but didn’t close it. “I’m on the real easy stuff, still, because you’re right.” He rubbed his eyes. With the full moon still a few nights away, he didn’t yet look as sickly as he inevitably would, but still appeared drawn and tired. “Flitwick’s was brutal.”

“Christmas,” James repeated impatiently, and as Remus smiled, he suddenly looked less worn down, and transformed again into a lad of seventeen. He gave James an exaggerated, _well will you get on with it_? gesture, as if James had kept him waiting the whole time.

“Are you about to do a pitch?” Sirius asked.

“Yes. Listen.” James drew himself up, and held out three fingers. “I’ve got three reasons why I want to stay—and why I think you all should stay too. First—” here he ticked off a finger, “We’ve never been at Hogwarts for Christmas before. Don’t you wonder what it’s like?”

“Wildly festive, I’m sure, since Hagrid’s grown too many trees.” Peter nodded towards the massive Christmas across the room from them, just past the fireplace, which had appeared one morning, decked out in twinkling fairy lights and Gryffindor scarlet and gold. Similar trees dotted almost every area of the castle, with several in the Great Hall, and more scattered across classrooms, courtyards, the foyer, the Hospital Wing, even crammed into several corridors. Flitwick had decorated each tree differently, conjuring glossy, golden bubbles; real icicles; and color-changing baubles to hang from the branches. The sheer volume of trees had left some students wondering if Hagrid had cleared an entire patch of the Forbidden Forest to complete the job.

“The feast is supposed to be good too,” James continued. “And think about it—we’ve never been here when the castle isn’t packed to its full capacity. Do you know how easy it will be to get around at night? We can double and triple check that we haven’t missed any passages for the map.”

Sirius began to look interested, which didn’t surprise James at all. He loved to sneak out of the common room at night, just for the sake of it, for the thrill of rule-breaking, and they’d done it seldom so far that year.

“Reason number two.” James ticked off a second finger. “We can go to Hogsmeade. I bet I could talk McGonagall into letting us go during the day—”

“Has anyone ever talked McGonagall into anything?” Remus asked skeptically.

“—and if she says no, we can just go at night. Or we can do both. We’ve never been at Hogsmeade for Christmas time either.”

“I didn’t know you were so sentimental about Christmas, Prongs,” Remus said, his skepticism even clearer.

James shrugged. “Well, it’s our last one here. Seems kind of important, doesn’t it? Who knows where we’ll be next year.”

“Oh, we’ll be together,” Sirius said, almost severely, like a warning.

“But it won’t be _here_ ,” James insisted. “And that’ll make everything different.”

James had felt scared, truly, the first day of seventh year. There was a certain finality in knowing that it was his last first day of school, _ever_ , in his whole life. For six years, he’d been able to rely on the fact that, no matter what happened, there would be more time at Hogwarts, more time with his friends, just more time. Now, as each day melted away, time felt more and more like a precious commodity, each day one he would never get back.

But there was more to it than that, of course. “Third.” He lowered his finger and leaned back, resting his arms on the sides of his chair. “Moony, your furry little problem comes to visit in four days. You said it yourself earlier this year—the visit is harder when you’re at home. So why go through it there? If we stay, we can handle it here, like we always do.”

Remus finally shut his book, then, and placed it on the forgotten chessboard. His eyes looked strangely bright, and the nearby fireplace cast odd, flickering shadows across the long, thin scar that ran across his left cheek, the only flaw on his otherwise handsome face. “I don’t need everyone to change their plans because of me,” he said, and James recognized immediately that his pride piqued at the thought.

“There are two other reasons, too,” Sirius pointed out, and James knew then that he had come fully around on the plan.

“I can’t.” Peter looked truly put out. He seemed to understand, even though Sirius and Remus hadn’t explicitly agreed to stay, that they would eventually. “Mum’ll be alone if I’m not there, and I already told her I was coming.”

James sat, silent for a moment, wracking his brain for a way that Peter could somehow avoid going home. Yet he only had to imagine Peter’s mum—short, pale, and rather frail-looking, with a nervous smile and kind blue eyes—to understand that Peter could not disappoint her, even if he desperately wanted to. “It won’t be the same,” he finally said, truthfully. “Or, it wouldn’t be the same,” he corrected quickly. “If we stay, that is.”

Peter sighed, and reached out to pull his onyx king piece from the chessboard, which he turned over and over again in his hands. The joy he’d gotten from trouncing Sirius had clearly gone, and he looked, as the other three watched him, clearly miserable. “It’s fine,” he said finally, as if convincing himself, and looked up to give them his best attempt at a smile. “No, really,” he insisted as Remus began to interject. “If you want to stay, don’t go home on my account. I mean, we wouldn’t be together even if we all went home anyway, beside you two.” He nodded at Sirius and James. “So stay and help Moony, and tell me about it when I get back. You’ll be able to get under the Willow okay without me?”

“Yes, we can do that no problem. That’s not why we want you to stick around, Wormtail,” Sirius insisted, so sincerely that Peter again looked gratified.

“You’re taking this better than I would, if you lot were to stay together and I had to leave,” James told him quietly, impressed.

Peter smiled, and didn’t voice what he—and the others, even James—thought: that that would never happen. James was the heart of their group, their unofficial leader, and they never deviated from his path.

“Look,” Remus broke in, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. “That’s all well and good, and thanks, Prongs, for suggesting it, and Wormtail, thanks going along with it, even though you have to go home.”

“I’m also here,” Sirius pointed out, but Remus ignored him.

“But I don’t want to be the reason we all change our Christmas plans. I can handle the problem at home this month. It’s not a big deal. Besides, I’m going to have to soon, aren’t I? How many months do we have until we graduate?”

James stared at him, confused. “So?” It hit him. “Mate, obviously we’re still going to get together for this after we graduate. It’ll be easier then, really. We can just Apparate into Hogsmeade.”

It hadn’t occurred to him that he might not be the only one who worried about how much things would change come June.

Sirius gave a bark of a laugh. “Moony, you think we worked this hard to join you to just give it up in a few months?”

Remus said nothing, and a silence fell, one that lengthened with a certain sort of awkwardness that hadn’t happened between the four of them for as long as James could recall.

“Prongs,” Sirius said suddenly. He nodded towards where Lily had just emerged from the portrait hole, her face pink with chill. “Is she staying?”

“Yes.” The question came so out of left field that James didn’t understand the point, not until Sirius widened his eyes at him, just a fraction of a difference, and tipped his head almost unnoticeably towards Remus, who had begun to grin.

“Wait, is that really why you want to stay?” Remus asked, and relief flooded his features. He picked his book back up, rifling through the pages. “ _Ah_.” Somehow, he managed to make the single syllable speak volumes.

“It’s not!” James insisted, and it wasn’t, but Sirius kept looking at him in a way James entirely understood, his head still tipped towards Remus, as if to say _let him have this_. “Well—if there were a fourth reason to stay, for me, she might tip the scales. But it’s not about that.”

Somehow the defensiveness in his voice only made the case against him, not for him.

Peter chortled. “Okay, I feel better. If this is actually a case of you all staying so Prongs can chase after Evans, I won’t miss anything. I’ve seen that script play out. I know how it goes.”

“You could have just said so at the beginning,” Remus added, and he now looked mollified, his pride no longer at stake.

As he watched Remus’ mood change so instantly, James thought, for the first time, that Lily might have something right in her insistence that one person’s embarrassment could often wipe out another’s.

“Here, let’s make sure she’s staying, you know, just double-check.” Sirius cupped a hand over his mouth. “Oi, Evans! C’mere!”

James fought the urge to hide his face in his hands.

Lily turned to look at them, mid-way through conversing with Marlene and Hestia Jones. She gave a visible, long-suffering sigh, muttered something to her friends, and then crossed the common room to them. “Yes?” she asked warily, unfastening and removing her cloak, which she draped over one arm.

“How are you?” Sirius asked jauntily. “Pull up a chair, won’t you?”

James watched her hesitate, clearly only too aware—as he was—that more than a few sets of eyes watched the interaction, probably hoping for some post-exam entertainment in the form of one of his and her famous rows. “I’m just peachy, Black, thanks.” She didn’t summon a chair, but perched on the arm of Remus’. She turned his book over in his hands so she could examine the cover, a move performed easily, with great familiarity. “ _Hippocrates’ Help,”_ she read aloud, and then looked to Remus. “I’ve read this one. So has Hestia. It’s alright, really, but she thinks it’s basically worthless.”

“Really?” Remus asked, intrigued. “Why?”

“She has this whole thing about how books like this separate the many different forms of healing—you know, stressing the importance of healing charms over, say, healing plants, which is where her interest really lies. She thinks Healers don’t look towards Herbology nearly enough.”

Peter groaned. “No more school talk, Evans, please, not tonight.”

“Yeah, can you focus?” Sirius asked, waving a hand to direct her attention back to him.

“I might, if I knew what I was meant to focus on.”

“We were planning to go home for Christmas, but now we’re planning to stay,” Remus told her. Despite his growing embarrassment, James couldn’t conceal a delighted grin at Remus’ casual confirmation of his plan. “We wondered if you were staying too.”

“Yes. Potter knows that.” As she turned to look at him, bemused, James felt heat begin to flood his chest.

They hadn’t spoken in the handful of days that had passed since Slughorn’s Christmas party, not really. James wasn’t sure what to blame it on—the chaos of exams or some sort of newfound awkwardness after their near kiss, something he wasn’t sure if she felt, but he definitely did. They had had their final prefect meeting of the term two evenings prior, and she had acted perfectly polite towards him, although brisk in her overall manner. He’d only found out, then, that she wasn’t going home for Christmas, as she polled the prefects to find out who planned to stay at Hogwarts and could help with some limited patrol duty over the holiday. Only she and two of the Hufflepuff prefects planned to stay, and James had to admit—but to himself, only to himself—that hearing that she planned to spend Christmas in the castle (and, in addition, that Morton planned to go home) cinched a lot of his growing desire to stay as well.

“Right, I told them I knew that,” James added quickly. “But we wondered if you knew who else was staying as well.” It seemed a plausible enough lie, and better than explaining that Sirius had called her over to take the mickey out of him.

“Hestia’s staying, but I think that’s it. We figured it would just be us.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Evans,” Sirius said, although he sounded anything but.

“All you ever do is disappoint me, so it’s hardly a disappointment anymore, strangely enough.” She smiled as she said it, and Sirius laughed, clearly pleased and ready to banter back, but she turned again to James. “Will you patrol a bit, then? I think most everyone plans to go home, so Filch should be able to take care of most of it.” She paused, her expression suddenly skeptical. “Or at least I figured he could, but now that I know you four are staying…”

“Three,” Peter corrected. He no longer sounded as glum as he had before, but clearly the idea still rankled. “I’ve got to go home. See my mum.”

Lily nodded, and bit the corner of her lip briefly. “You should sit with Marlene on the train,” she offered. She sounded completely blasé, and didn’t even bother to look at him, instead watched the progress of her hands, still red with chill, as she began to unwind her long plait. “She’ll be with Rooney, and I expect he and Morton and the other Ravenclaws will talk your ear off about Quidditch, try to figure out what Gryffindor’s strategies are, all that. I’ll tell her you plan to. She’ll be pleased, I expect—it’ll mean they won’t lob all their questions at her.”

Gratitude twisted with distaste in James’ mouth. He hadn’t even considered who Peter would sit with on the train, because they’d always taken it together, and he felt a rush of appreciation towards her for thinking of that, furthering the heat in his chest. But at the same time, hearing Morton’s name—especially from her lips—left him with its usual stab of irritation.

Had she talked to him again, since Slughorn’s party? James had wanted to ask her—wanted to ask her still—but didn’t know if he should, or how she’d react.

Unashamed appreciation read all over Peter’s face, but he tried to match her nonchalant tone. “I suppose I could do that, maybe feed them some disinformation,” he said, and James marveled, briefly, at how Lily had managed to so clearly help him without seemingly an ounce of pity that could wound his pride. A glance at Sirius confirmed that he appeared to have the same thought, and also that James could learn something from it given his so recent dealings with Remus—although on the latter, James wondered if he was projecting a bit of his own thoughts onto Sirius’ expression.

“Great.” She stood up, shook her hair out, and glanced back at James as she did so. He reached up to rub his forehead, worried his admiration showed all over his face. “Patrol was a mess tonight,” she said, and if she noticed his expression, she didn’t look it. “I swear, mating season just explodes after end-of-term exams. I don’t know why everyone thinks the Astronomy tower is the best place to snog, it’s so bloody cold. I checked it three times, and found couples there twice.”

“Okay, tell me everything. _This_ sounds like the fun part of being a prefect.” Sirius leaned forward, intrigued.

“It’s really not,” Remus said mildly. James wondered, not for the first time, how his friend felt to have lost his prefect position when James became Head Boy. They had never discussed it. “You see a lot more of people than you’d want to.”

“And it’s never anyone you’d want to see, you know?” Lily mused.

Based on his own experience, having seen her, James firmly disagreed there.

“Evans!” Sirius sounded delightfully scandalized.

“What?” she asked without shame. “I saw a Hufflepuff’s arse tonight, and I’d never thought about his arse before, and now that’s all I’ll think about when he’s around. I will never look at him again.”

“Who was it?” Sirius asked as they all began to laugh.

“Oh, she won’t tell you,” Remus said, and James noticed something fond, in his voice and face, as he looked up at Lily. “There’s an unspoken prefect code. You never reveal who you see if you catch people at it. It just seems wrong, you know? No point in shaming anyone, letting that get all around.”

“Although we used to tell each other all the time,” Lily reminded him.

“Well, we kept finding the same people. Do you remember—”

Watching them, a taunting little voice whispered repeated Lily’s words in James’ ear. _“When you’re around someone constantly,”_ she had said, floating in the water of the prefect’s bathtub, _“Some things just…happen.”_

But he knew better, right?

Lily cut Remus off. “Not in front of this lot. Prefect code!” she reminded him, laughing. She continued to smile as she looked back to James, who made himself return the gesture, if woodenly. “Just keep an eye out when you’re on duty tomorrow. Everyone has one more day before break to get it out of their systems.”

He wondered, no matter how hard he tried to banish the thought, if that included her.

“I’ve never caught anyone,” he said, and then felt heat creep up the back of his neck as she gave him a look, one eyebrow raised, that he doubted anyone (except maybe Sirius) could read. He recognized the accusation in her expression. _Except me_ , it seemed to say. He rushed on. “How many points did you take tonight?”

“Do you take more if you see their arses?” Peter asked.

“I’ve never considered it, Pettigrew, but I probably should. I didn’t take any points tonight, just bawled them out a bit and sent them back to their common rooms. What?” she asked at Sirius’ disbelieving noise.”

“Just very magnanimous of you, that’s all,” he assured her innocently.

She shrugged. “I blame them less after exams. It’s like a near-death experience for some people—”

“Sure felt like it,” Peter muttered.

“—which of course means so many people just need to feel alive again afterwards. I only wish they’d pick a different place than the Astronomy tower. I don’t know how anyone gets their pants down. I was only there for maybe five minutes and I just about froze my tits off.”

“They still look great,” James said, which sent Sirius and Peter into hysterics. Remus, too, began to laugh, although he covered his face with his hand, but not before he shot James a look torn somewhere between exasperation and amusement. Even as he laughed, Peter pushed his chair back, out of the line of fire between where Lily stood and James sat, clearly anticipating some sort of furious retort, either verbally or magically.

But none came. “Thanks, Potter, you’re such a gent,” she said sarcastically, but her smile didn’t falter, and there was no real acid in her voice. “Anyway, just keep an eye out tomorrow.” She tossed them a half-wave and left them there, to return to Marlene and Hestia.

As his friends’ laughter died down, James felt, rather than saw, that they turned to him, as he kept his eyes trained on Lily’s retreating form. “Don’t ask,” he finally said after a few moments of expectant silence. “Couldn’t tell you. Don’t even understand it myself.”

He looked back in time to see Remus nod slowly. “I can see why we’re staying,” he said simply, and James didn’t ask after what he meant.

**xxx**

McGonagall seemed largely suspicious when James, Sirius, and Remus approached her with a request to stay at the castle over Christmas.

“Really?” she asked crossly, and she didn’t bother to look up from grading. Her quill darted particularly savagely across the exam in front of her, in a way that made James hope, very fervently, that it didn’t belong to him. “You couldn’t have decided this weeks ago, when everyone else did? You expect me to believe that the three of you came to this decision—just now, one day before the train leaves!—with no mischief or mayhem in mind?”

“Professor—” Sirius began with an indignant air, but Remus cut him off.

“I actually thought it might be better for me to stay behind, Professor, all things considered,” he said quietly. With the full moon nearing, his complexion had started to turn rather gray. “I had wanted to go home and see my family, and I really planned to, but after thinking about it, I realized it’s easier for me here than it is at home at this time of month. And Sirius and James…well, they wanted to stay and support me as much as they could.”

McGonagall inhaled sharply and looked up. Her piercing eyes landed on the three of them in turn, and then settled on Remus, where they softened to gentler than James had ever seen. “Oh.” She cleared her throat, and then returned to her grading, but with much less vigor. “Of course, Lupin. Of course, the three of you are welcome to stay. I trust you will owl your parents, and I will inform the headmaster.”

“Moony, that was _brilliant_!” Sirius hissed once they’d escaped her office. “I’ve never been prouder.”

James tried to smother his laugh, so relieved it almost sounded hysterical. “A bit of a gamble, though, wasn’t it? Did she already know that we know?”

Remus ducked his head rather sheepishly, but he couldn’t hide his grin as well, which brightened his face past the haggard look he’d given McGonagall. “No, at least I hadn’t told her. But she probably assumed that I’d told you all by this point, it’s been almost seven years now. Besides,” he added, as much to himself as to them, “I didn’t tell her anything that wasn’t true. Just…not all of the truth.”

**xxx**

They waved Peter off the next day, who, to his credit, affected admirably high spirits.

“Don’t send Padfoot under the Willow first,” he cautioned with a grin. “Remember last time he tried? Full branch to the gut.”

Sirius touched his stomach reminiscently, almost fondly. “Still hurts when I think about it.”

“Pettigrew!” They turned to see Rooney gesturing from across the frozen grounds, Morton by his side and Marlene under his arm, with a cluster of other Ravenclaws behind them. “C’mon!” He sounded as friendly and open as if the idea for Peter to ride with them had originated with him, and not Lily. James felt a warm sense of gratitude, undeniably toward Lily, but increasingly towards Rooney as well.

Peter obviously felt it too. “Well, I’m off to give them a ton of fake Quidditch plays,” he said, and he sounded as if he truly didn’t mind the situation. James reached out to clap him on the back, and Peter returned the gesture before he trotted away.

“Better man than us,” Sirius noted affectionately as they watched him go. “I’d be throwing a right fit if I were forced to sit in a compartment with those gits all the way to London.”

“Nice of them to include him, though,” Remus said firmly, fairly. “Lily didn’t have to suggest it, and they didn’t have to agree.”

But James knew why they had. He had seen Marlene’s face when she’d looked up at Rooney as he’d called over, clearly all the more smitten by his kindness, and knew Rooney must have felt her look too, and reveled in it. And Morton… He looked past Peter, even as Marlene and Rooney watched him approach, scanning the grounds. His gaze landed on the three of them, and James didn’t bother to look away. He felt certain that Morton searched for Lily, hoping she’d come to say goodbye, so she could see that they’d done as she asked and included Peter.

Yet James knew—knew because he’d already looked at the milling masses of students exchanging hugs and calling out farewells—that she hadn’t bothered to come outside.

**xxx**

The castle felt altogether different when they went back inside, which Sirius noted in a quieter voice than usual, as the absence of hundreds of pairs of feet and hundreds of voices now seemed to magnify his. They were used to seeing the castle this empty, but only at nighttime. Somehow, James thought, the silence felt more eerie in the daylight than it did in the dark.

But once they returned to the common room, aside from missing Peter, it began to feel like an ordinary full moon day. Remus took to his bed, intent on resting before his transformation, which always took a lot out of him. Full moons had the opposite effect on Sirius and James, who, James knew guiltily, enjoyed the experience without any of the physical or emotional pain Remus felt. Although too keyed up to sit still, he and Sirius still pulled their favorite armchairs near the fire and tried several rounds of Exploding Snap, before Sirius finally threw the cards on the floor, where several exploded at once. “Let’s go to the Quidditch pitch, fly a bit,” he suggested.

It didn’t escape James’ notice that he hadn’t seen Lily and Hestia all morning or afternoon. He worried, briefly, that perhaps Lily had changed her mind on the holiday just as—perhaps just _because_ —he had changed his, and had gotten on the train to go home after all. But he told himself, more firmly than he felt, that it wouldn’t matter if she had gone, because he would have a good time with his mates regardless.

And that night, when he, Remus, and Sirius raced their animal forms around the snowy acres outside Hogsmeade, he realized that he believed it.

**xxx**

Still, James felt no small amount of pleasure the next morning when he came down the stairs in Gryffindor tower to see Lily and Hestia occupying the same chairs he and Sirius had sat in the day before. He stood still for a moment, glad that Remus and Sirius hadn’t yet stirred from their lie-in, because he couldn’t hide the grin that broke over his face.

He watched Lily struggle with the knitting needles in her hands, her eyes trained on the identical pair in Hestia’s that moved with ease. “I hate doing things that I’m bad at!” she exclaimed, and her voice rose enough in frustration that James could hear her from the stairs.

“Spoken like someone who is really never bad at anything,” he heard Hestia reply as he walked towards them, her voice much quieter, calmer. “Besides, you’re not bad at this—you’ve never done it. So it doesn’t count as something you’re bad at.”

“But I have knitted. Well, tried. My grandmother tried to teach me, but it just didn’t take. Petunia ended up with all the lessons, because I was just a total lost cause and wanted to play outside with Snape.” She looked up just in time to see James flinch as he approached. He often forgot—or tried to forget—that she and Snape had grown up together, especially after they had apparently stopped talking following their final, infamous row in fifth year. “I assume you were out of bed last night, weren’t you?” she asked him irritably, tossing her knitting needles on the ground.

“What makes you say that?” he asked, summoning himself an armchair and sitting down without an invitation. He watched Hestia pick up Lily’s discarded needles and hand them back to her patiently. “You alright, Jones?” She smiled at him pleasantly enough, and he thought then, as he had in years past, that she had always seemed to loathe him a bit less than Lily and Marlene did—unless she just she hid it better.

“Good, thanks. And you?” Her forehead puckered with legitimate curiosity.

“I assume you were out, and Hestia asks that way, because you’re sporting a really spectacular black eye.” Lily transfigured one of her knitting needles into a mirror and handed it to him. He could feel her watching him closely as he pulled at his eyelid, admiring the swollen purple bruise. “Out of bed at night, not up until eleven, visible injuries—who’s your woman, Potter, and what did you do to make her so mad?” she asked, her voice light and airy, and Hestia laughed. Yet he thought she sounded, still, more inquisitive than usual—unless that was his own wishful thinking.

“Well, her name is Sirius, and she obviously gets jealous easily, so be careful.” He transfigured the knitting needle back to its original form and handed it back to her, grinning as she laughed. “We were just mucking about last night, dueling, and he got a little too into it. I got him just as good, though,” he added, unable to resist padding his own ego a bit, but also sure Sirius would feel just as sore as he did when he woke up. To his recollection, his black eye had actually come at Remus’ hands, in one of those moments where Remus-as-Moony simply underestimated his own strength and had lunged at him, taking him unawares. But he doubted either Lily or Hestia would believe that Remus—gentle, human Remus, the only Remus they both knew—had it in him to wound anyone, even in a duel.

“All this in your dorm?” Hestia asked. She looked at Lily, doubtful. “We _were_ out late, but…”

“Wait, where were you?” He rounded on Lily. “You get after me for being out of bed, when you’re not in yours either?”

“I was patrolling, Potter,” she said, now all sarcasm and rolled eyes. She picked her knitting needles back up and, at Hestia’s sweet, encouraging smile, accepted a ball of pale green yard. “Hestia came with me. And before you ask, no, that doesn’t mean you can let Black or Remus tag along from now on. Filch saw us and tried to bring us in for rule-breaking, but we talked our way out of it. I imagined he’d throw the three of you in detention for months if he saw you out at night, patrolling or not.”

He stared. “How did you talk Filch out of it? I’ve never been able to get anything by him.”

She shrugged. “Reminded him I was Head Girl, so I had reason to be out at night. And then Hestia asked if he knew either of our names, and of course he didn’t—he just knows me on sight from patrols, and I don’t know if he’s ever so much as noticed Hestia.” She smiled at her friend, clearly proud. “So then Hestia pointed out—but so sweetly, it would have sounded so much worse coming from me, because I just didn’t have it in me to pull that sort of tone—that if he didn’t know our names, that must mean we weren’t the sort of students who would be out of bed to break the rules.”

“And that _worked?_ How? _”_ Sirius’ incredulous voice made all three of them jump; no one had seen him or Remus approach. James noted, a little bitterly, that neither of them looked visibly worse for the wear, besides Remus’ slightly pale complexion. His bitterness only increased when Sirius took one look at his face and burst out laughing. “Sorry, mate, sorry!”

“I already told them about our duel,” James explained quickly, and, to his credit, Sirius didn’t so much as blink.

“I knew I got you good with a couple spells, but I didn’t think I’d given you such a shiner!” he exclaimed, and James relaxed enough to laugh as soon as he heard Sirius name himself the culprit. “Did you tell them that Remus here gave us worst of it all?” he asked, clapping Remus on the back, who winced a little, which didn’t escape Hestia’s sharp eye.

“Are you all hurt?” she asked reproachfully.

Lily sighed, a long-suffering sound. “Of course they are,” she said with exaggerated patience. “C’mon, you’ve met them. This is what they do.”

“I suppose.” Hestia set down her knitting needles, and Lily instantly followed suit. “We could go down to the greenhouse and get some Dittany. It would help your eye, Potter.”

“So would a healing charm,” Lily countered, and although no animosity colored her tone, she spoke in the voice of one continuing a long argument, as if they had had this disagreement many times. “And then we wouldn’t have to go out in the cold.”

“I’m actually curious about the Dittany,” Remus said, and he had a look on his face that James recognized well, that of pure, academic interest. “Could we go now? We could compare their efficacy, Dittany against healing charms.”

Sirius groaned. “Really? _Really?_ This is how you want to spend your holiday, Remus? _This?”_

But Hestia looked pleased, and Lily not disinterested. “But what will we compare it to?” Lily asked. “We can’t half-cure Potter’s eye. Although,” she added thoughtfully, “We could blacken the other.”

At that, Remus grinned. “I’m sure we’re wounded enough for comparisons, between the three of us.”

**xxx**

Even from the beginning, James would realize later, the five of them came together easily that Christmas break, as if they had spent the past six years not simply passing in corridors, but as real friends.

He’d overlooked Hestia entirely for years, as, he realized belatedly, most people probably did. She seemed to lack the spark of her two closest friends, so much less fiery and outgoing than Lily and Marlene, that she paled a bit in comparison. Yet when he watched her explain the proper manner of harvesting Dittany to Remus, he realized, looking at their faces, that their personalities seemed to line up almost exact—thoughtful, mild, perhaps a bit more serious than the people they hung around with, and a bit beyond their years, in a way that made people forget them entirely next to the bright lights of their friends that burned around them. She and Remus seemed suitably matched, he thought for a moment or two. Then he watched the way her eyes brightened and her always-pink cheeks flushed still darker at Sirius’ triumphant laugh as he connected a snowball with the back of James’ head. James had turned to Lily, wondering if she recognized the look of infatuation of her friend’s face, but found her promptly returning Sirius’ fire, the back of her fiery red hair also powdered with a fine spray of snow.

After breaking for lunch, they spent much of the afternoon in the common room, drying off, getting warm, and healing.

Remus watched the most closely, clearly intrigued, as Lily reached into the cauldron of Essence of Dittany she’d just pulled off the fire to dampen a square of cloth. She knelt by James’ side and dabbed it along the thick scratch that wrapped around his ribcage, her other hand cool against his skin where he’d pulled up his jumper, needlessly helping him hold it in place. She glanced up at him, all sweetness, although he recognized the look as immediately insincere the moment she read his expression and she pressed her lips together, stifling a smile.

James felt heat flood his face, the same heat that seemed to radiate from the rest of his body, as she dropped her head and her hair fell in front of her face. Nearby, Sirius began to snigger, which he managed to hide passably well in a rough, hacking cough.

“Merlin!” he said once the fit seemed to have passed. “Could someone drink Dittany, for their lungs? I feel like I might need to.”

“You can drink Essence of Dittany, but it wouldn’t help your lungs unless they’re internally wounded, like bruised or bleeding,” Hestia answered seriously, apparently missing the jest in his voice. “Look!” she exclaimed to Remus, pointing needlessly to the greenish smoke that rose from James’ side. “That’s how you can tell it’s working. And when the smoke clears…”

When the smoke cleared, James reached to touch his side, and he felt only smooth, reknitted skin.

“You can also pour, rather than dab, which can help conserve the Essence,” Hestia continued, and she sounded like a mini-instructor. “We’re lucky here, that Hogwarts lets us use as much as we want of almost anything in the greenhouses, because Sprout is talented enough that she can grow just about anything and in larger quantities than most growers. But Dittany is actually pretty expensive to buy in Diagon Alley. Still, even though pouring often works better, it makes sense that Lily would dab it on Potter’s wound, because of the way it wrapped around his ribcage. Because of the curve, you might miss the wound as you pour, so dabbing works just as well.”

“Healing charms work just as well too,” Lily pointed out cheekily as she rose to her feet. “And all you need is your wand, which these three gits had last night, so I’m not sure how you’ve waited this long to heal yourself, it’s mind-boggling. Remus, I know you know some healing charms. I’ve seen where you’ve used them on yourself.”

James wondered, of course, where on his body she had seen them.

“You don’t really think about these things when you’re in a duel,” Sirius told her, saving Remus from the pressures of formulating a response.

“Don’t look so surprised,” James told Lily. “You said earlier that this is just what we do.”

“That doesn’t make it smart,” she snapped back, and, with the last of his wounds healed, she pulled the hem of his jumper down harder than necessary, clearly annoyed. “Did you ever stop to think about what would happen if one of ou seriously got injured fighting a duel like this? Do you know where you’d go or what you’d do?”

“Honestly? No.”

“Of course not.” She sighed, and then turned to Remus. “I can show you some of the more complicaated healing charms on Black, if you’d like. What are your bets he’ll scream?”

And Sirius did scream, eventually, just for the theatrics of it, but not because it hurt in the least.

**xxx**

They set up games after dinner, with Sirius challenging Lily to chess while Hestia sat down to teach Remus how to play Bavarian Exploding Snap. She offered to teach James too, but he begged off, using his upcoming patrol duty as an excuse. He felt strangely content to lounge in a chair near Sirius and Lily, his legs draped over the chair’s arm and his head leaned against the wingback.

Lily insisted that she didn’t care much for wizard’s chess, but set up a remarkably good defense as Sirius began taking her pieces, and soon captured enough that nearly as many of his sat in crumbled heaps across the board.

“Were you having me on?” he asked accusingly as her knight claimed one of his rooks. “Never play my arse—I play Pete at least three times a week and even he doesn’t put up this kind of fight sometimes.”

“She really rarely plays, at least that I’ve seen,” Hestia defended loyally, and her she took her eyes off the table between her and Remus just long enough her enough for two of the cards in front of her to explode. “Ouch!” She brought singed fingertips to her lips, and then looked over to Lily, smiling behind her hand. “And she hates doing things she’s bad at.”

“Why were you knitting earlier?” James asked, remembering.

“It’s calming and a good creative outlet,” Hestia answered before Lily could speak. Her voice carried a certain sort of crispness that imparted that she’d said these words before, and many times.

“Both of which Hestia thinks I need in my life,” Lily continued, and she made a smacking gestured towards Sirius, although her hands didn’t come anywhere near him, as he moved his rook forward, laughing, and encroached on her king. Her eyes flickered to James and she smiled, and he felt a familiar flutter in his chest at the sight. “I told her that I have plenty of creative outlets—like, I find new ways to make you miserable all the time. That’s creative.”

He wasn’t sure if she meant for the words to bring him pleasure, but they absolutely did.

“And he loves it,” Sirius said breezily, and James resisted the urge to glare at his friend, because even if it was true, he didn’t have to make it so known. “And we love it, too. Cheers, Evans, truly. Keeps him a bit humble. Check.”

“Humble? Potter? Never.” But she didn’t sound like she meant it, not really, not in the way she might have in the past.

And so the long battle began, of Sirius chasing Lily’s king around the board, taking a few final pieces just for show. When he finally cornered her, midway between a rook and his queen, she gave up and knocked her king over before he could throw down his crown, although not in bad humor. She did, however, shoot a mild stinging hex Sirius’ way when he wouldn’t stop laughing at his victory, in a way he never did when he beat Peter. He only yelped as the spell landed on his chest, but otherwise didn’t acknowledge what she’d done, although he kept his gloating to a simple grin after that.

A short while later nine thirty rolled around, and James rose to his feet. “I have to go patrol.” He paused, debating, his heart in his mouth. “Evans, d’you want to walk with me?” he asked, and he wished Sirius had the same tact as Remus, enough to look away from the scene.

She didn’t move from where she’d settled on the common room’s squishiest sofa after the chess game, curled up under a conjured blanket with her head on Hestia’s lap. But she did smile, slow and amused, and the way she looked up at him seemed careful, almost searching. “No,” she said simply, and then waited, watched, to see how he’d react. “But ask me again later, some other time.” He knew from the way that she giggled—yes, _giggled_ , the sound foreign to his ears—that she, too, recalled that she’d spoken the same words at Slughorn’s Christmas party. And then she stretched, seemingly carelessly, and reengaged Hestia in their previous conversation about a _Teen Witch Weekly_ article Hestia read from the magazine held over Lily’s head.

He couldn’t help a glance back at his friends before he left, just in time to see Remus mouth something at Sirius, his brow furrowed, while a grin all but split Sirius’ face. Sirius caught his eye and winked, and James hurried out the portrait hole before he laugh out loud from the sheer buoyancy of his mood.

Patrol went smoothly, smoother than it had ever gone before, because it felt like no other soul besides his own walked Hogwarts’ floors that night. James spent a good portion of the time prodding behind every ornamental tapestry he could find, his mission to double- and triple-check the castle for any overlooked passageways still fresh on his mind. He also spoke at length to the portrait of Mirabella Plunkett, who guarded a secret passage on the first-floor landing. She seemed pleased at the conversation, despite the hour (unlike many of the other portraits, who called for him to put out his wand even before he could approach), and promised to visit some of her friends’ frames to find out if they knew of any shortcut he might have missed. Shortly thereafter, he came upon Professor McGonagall as she left the Transfiguration classroom, still dressed in her day robes and with her hair pulled back as severely as ever. When she saw him patrolling, she greeted him briskly, although James thought he saw a flash of pride on her face before she swept away.

All in all, it seemed a very successful night.

By the time he returned to the common room, the fire burned low in the grate, throwing off about as much light as the glowing Christmas tree, which left the empty room otherwise dark. Yet the moment he took a step forward, out of the portrait hole, his feet silent on the plush carpet, he heard voices, and he froze by instinct.

“I’m not asking you to tell me anything that you don’t want to tell me.” He recognized Lily’s voice, although her voice lacked the firmness with which she usually spoke, and had taken on more soft, meaningful emotion than he’d ever heard before. “I just want you to be aware what it looks like, and to be careful, so no one else asks questions.”

“I appreciate your concern.” And James recognized Remus’ voice, even as he craned his neck and saw the pair of them standing, alone, at the bottom of the dormitory stairs. “But I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Fucking hell.” And now a certain hardness reached her tone, as she grabbed Remus’ arm when he turned to leave, and with enough force that she managed to pull him back into place. “Do you want me to stay it? Because I don’t want to put the words in your mouth, but I will. Christ, Remus, I’ve been taking notes for you once a month in Arithmancy for, what, over three years now? Do you think I’ve never glanced at a calendar and realized what those dates add up to? I’ve seen the way that you look before you disappear, and how you look after. And no spells make those kinds of wounds, the ones we saw today, even though I tried to act like I believed your bullshit explanations for Hestia’s sake. I’m not _stupid_.”

James’ stomach dropped.

“I never said—”

She cut him off, not with words, but by thrusting whatever she held in her hands into his unwilling arms. “Just take it, okay? I know there’s no way you lot aren’t injured aside from what you showed us. And I can teach you the charms, the healing spells you don’t know—I would have ages ago, _if you would have let me.”_

Remus stood, silent, and turned an object over in his hands. A bit of twinkling fairy light from the Christmas tree reflected off the side, and James recognized it as a small potions vial. He would have bet his brand new Cleansweep Five that it contained the rest of the Essence of Dittany. James hesitated, heart pounding, wondering when—no, if—he should interrupt.

“Okay,” Remus said finally.

“Okay?”

“You can teach me.” Remus’ voice took on a professional, academic quality. “I know the basic spells for healing surface wounds, obviously, but there are other things I can’t quite crack, like if there’s something muscular—oh.” He broke off as Lily launched herself into his arms, pressing her face just below his collarbone, her arms wrapped securely around his back and hands raised up to grip each of his shoulders. Remus put his own arms around her, and even as James felt his adrenaline turn to jealous ashes in his mouth, he had the presence of mind to gratefully note that the way Remus patted her hair looked rather stilted and awkward, as if he wasn’t used to touching her.

“I trust that you’re being careful, because I trust you.” Lily looked up at him, her arms still tight around his back, and James wished he could see her face better, to see if her eyes took on that quality he couldn’t get out of his mind after she’d looked at him with such fire in the prefect’s bathroom. “But I can’t not say it.”

“I know. Go ahead.” For the first time, Remus had a smile in his voice, clearly anticipating her next words.

“Just— _be careful_. Be careful yourself, and make sure those idiots are careful too,” she said, and James knew she meant him and Sirius and probably Peter, even though she hadn’t healed his injuries that day. “I’m not going to ask what role they play in this—”

“Thank you, really.”

“—but I know you know the risks, and definitely better than I do. And Remus, I would help you anytime, whatever you need, no questions asked.” She let him go, stepped back, and pulled a hand through her long, loose hair. “You could have told me,” she said, without a hint of reproach, as if she fully understood his reasoning, but still needed to speak her piece. “I assumed a long time ago, but it wasn’t my place to ask. And it never changed anything. I’ve never thought of you any different.”

Remus pulled her back in for a second hug, and James wished he could see the expression on his friend’s face instead, which loomed even further in the shadows than Lily’s. “I know,” he said meaningfully, and left it at that.

“I’m to bed,” Lily told him after a beat, slipping away from him. She took a couple steps up the stairs to the girls’ dormitory, then hesitated. “You’ll share that with Potter? And Black? she asked, gesturing to the bottle in his hands with a wave of her fingers. “I can brew more if you need.”

Again, James heard rather than saw Remus’ smile. “I will.” He started up his own stairs, skipping steps at twos and threes, back to his normal strength after the night before. “’Night, Lily.”

“’Night.”

James waited until he heard the faint click of two doors closing before he moved. Then he reached for the closest chair, sat down, and stared at his watch for a long, silent five minutes before he joined his friends upstairs.

Sirius still laid awake, propped up on his bed with a muggle motorcycle magazine, and Remus had just pulled back his own bedsheets, his eyes pink with exhaustion. Sirius tossed James the Essence of Dittany bottle as he walked in, which he caught without much effort.

“Evans gave me the rest,” Remus explained. “Padfoot and I already used some. I think I bit your leg last night, didn’t I?” he asked, entirely apologetic.

James nodded, and pulled up the leg of his jeans to pour a few drops of dittany on the bite, which vanished almost immediately. “No worries, mate,” he said, and he meant it. He paused, waiting for Remus to share the rest of his conversation with Lily, but he didn’t. “Nice of her,” James finally added.

“It was,” Remus replied, and said no more.

After they turned the lights out, James lay awake for a long time, listening to his friends snore.

**xxx**

“Potter, your requests are getting fairly ridiculous,” McGonagall said curtly at breakfast the next morning. Irritation seemed to put her entirely off her eggs, and she pushed them away. “I let you and your friends stay on for Christmas, even though you only gave me less than twenty-four hours’ notice. And now you’re asking for what, exactly?”

“It’s really not much, Professor,” he said earnestly, rocking back on his heels, and she snorted. He’d polished his Head Boy badge that morning for the first time in ages, and he hoped she noticed that he wore it, even subconsciously, in case it made her trust him more. “Compared to most Hogsmeade visits, this would be fairly simple. There are only, what—” He glanced around the Great Hall, and counted eleven heads breakfasting at the mid-morning hour. “There must not be more than fifteen of us here altogether, I’d wager, and even less that are third year and above. Filch would have an easier time checking us all in and out—”

“Did it occur to you, Potter, that _Mr._ Filch also plans to enjoy his holiday?”

“Well, then I’m sure we’d be happy to take over whatever his normal duties are during Hogsmeade visits,” Lily spoke up brightly, gesturing between the two of them. “We’re Head Boy and Girl, after all. I think we’ve been trusted with more this term than this, since so few students would go.”

James grinned at her, and when she caught the look, she smiled back. She had come up with the idea, when he’d floated the proposition that they ask McGonagall for a Hogsmeade visit, that they talk to her together, as a united front. “Think about it,” she had said, tossing a card down in Exploding Snap. “Who is McGonagall more likely to listen to—me and you, or you by yourself? Or, god forbid, you and Black?”

Even Sirius had instantly conceded the point.

“That’s hardly the point,” McGonagall snapped. “We plan Hogsmeade visits in advance for a reason, Evans. There are issues at play that you don’t understand.”

“What are they, Professor? We can handle them—I’m sure of it.” McGonagall opened her mouth crossly, but Lily plunged on. Something about the way she spoke seemed to switch subtly, and, although she didn’t look sick or sound defeated, as Remus had when he’d asked for the three of them to stay over Christmas, there was something about her—the quality of her voice, the look on her face, something—that reminded James of that moment very much. “I think it would be a good morale booster. So many of us are here not because we don’t want to go home for the holidays, but because we can’t. Remus fell ill. Hestia’s mum died last spring, and this is her first Christmas without her. My sister despises me enough for my magic that it’s not worth the trouble it would cause for me to go home. Black’s family—well, they’re just evil, aren’t they? Potter, when was the last time he even saw them? And that’s just our table. The holidays are _hard_ , Professor. It would be nice to forget that for a bit.”

Even though James recognized that she spoke, ultimately, to play on McGonagall’s sympathies enough to secure their visit, he could also tell that she meant it, just as Remus had meant his own reasoning for staying behind at Hogwarts for Christmas. She used the truth as she needed to, just as he had.

McGonagall could tell she meant it as well. Some of the tight lines around her mouth lessened, just a little. “Be that as it may—”

“I think it’s a fine idea.” Dumbledore had appeared sometime in the midst of Lily’s monologue. He took up his seat in the middle of the table, just at the edge of his conversation, and removed his pointed purple hat. Lily took a step back, away from him, and almost collided with James in the process, and he understood why. Dumbledore radiated a powerful energy that neither of them felt entirely comfortable with or were used to. They saw the headmaster frequently at mealtimes, certainly, but from a distance. James couldn’t recall a time he’d spoken to Dumbledore personally, aside from the last two years when Gryffindor had won the Quidditch cup, and briefly at the start of the term as Head Boy. “Come, Minerva, it’s Christmas,” Dumbledore continued indulgently, and he summoned a stack of toast his way with a silent, wandless wave, as if the impressive act came as naturally as blowing his nose. “You can hardly fault Ms. Evans and Mr. Potter for wishing to stretch their legs. And I have no doubt that they could make a valiant effort to get their on their own if they wished.” His mouth twitched under his long moustache. “Perhaps we should be glad they’re asking for official permission.”

“That _is_ a change of pace,” McGonagall admitted reluctantly. She favored James with a ghost of a smile. “It was nice to see you out patrolling last night, Potter, rather than after hours for some nefarious purpose.”

He grinned. “Cheers, Professor. Can we?” He had felt Lily’s curious eyes on him at Dumbledore’s suggestion that they could get to Hogsmeade on his own, and knew that she would pepper him with dozens of questions later. He had considered the prospect himself more than once, of simply taking one of the seven passageways out of Hogwarts and bypassing McGonagall completely, as he and his friends had done countless times before, instead of asking to go. But he knew that if he took a passageway to Hogsmeade he couldn’t bring Lily along—it was one thing, after all, to show her an internal passageway or two, but quite another to give away routes in and out of the castle, such major secrets that he and his friends had guarded so closely for years. And he hated that leaving her behind bothered him as much as it did.

McGonagall looked to Dumbledore, who gave her expansive motion with one wizened hand, as if to say, _as you wish_. “Fine,” she agreed reluctantly, and Lily fairly clapped her hands together in excitement. “Tomorrow, then, but only for the afternoon, and I expect you two to take care of everything. The village will be busy on Christmas Eve—make sure don’t overlook a single student when you check everyone in or out.”

When they walked back to Gryffindor tables, faces shining, Lily reached and gave James’ arm a friendly squeeze, and the sudden pressure of her touch almost made him jump. “That was brilliant!” she breathed, her voice hushed.

_“You_ were brilliant,” he said, and he swore he could feel the heat of her hand even after she pulled away. “Sirius will love that he’s officially now a sob story—truly, he will get a kick out of this.” His glanced to his friend, and his gaze landed on Hestia, who looked particularly flushed seated next to him. James wanted to ask about her mother, then, even though he wasn’t sure what he would say.

“ _We_ were brilliant—just such a good team.” She sounded so genuinely pleased by it—and James liked the sound of it so much—that his mind immediately shifted off of Hestia and back to her, once again buzzing with happiness. She stopped him before they reached the earshot of their friends ( _their_ friends, he thought, because it increasingly seemed possible that things would shift in that direction), again with a hand on his arm. “Will you show me sometime? What Dumbledore was talking about—the ways out of the castle?” she asked. He recognized the yearning in her voice, the same feeling he had felt the night before, scouring the corridors for even more secret rooms and passages—the need for adventure, to explore. He wasn’t sure he’d ever heard it from her before.

“If I can,” he said finally, and, to his surprise, she seemed mollified by that.

**xxx**

Later that afternoon, as he, Sirius, and Remus prowled the castle in the never-ending quest for secrets to add to the Marauders Map, Remus dropped the previous night’s bombshell.

“So, Lily knows about my furry little problem,” he said, and James knew he proffered the information casually on purpose, although he wasn’t sure if it was meant to keep him and Sirius calm, or wind them up. Either was possible.

_“What?”_ Sirius stopped short in his tracks, wand still pressed against where he tapped suspiciously behind a lone set of armor on the second floor. He rounded on Remus, his face a mask of panic. _“How?”_

“She told him last night,” James supplied, and met Remus’ surprised look. “I overheard the end when I got back from patrol.” There seemed little point trying to hide it. To his relief, Remus didn’t look apologetic in the last, which made the entire conversation seem entirely above board, no matter James’ various stabs of jealousy throughout. And it had been innocent, James knew, looking at his friend’s face in the light of day. He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t seen it then.

“You could have stepped in, helped me out,” Remus said, and he only sounded the faintest bit judgmental.

“Seemed important to let her go. I didn’t know what to do, honestly.”

“What did she say?” Sirius demanded, and now he looked between them, irate, obviously aware of the disadvantage in his lack of knowledge.

“A lot of stuff. I mean, we never said the word…” Remus trailed off, and looked around the deserted corridor, before continuing, lowering his voice to speak the single word, _“Werewolf_. I think she wanted me to say it, if either of us. But she pointed out all the classes I’ve missed, especially because she takes notes for me in Arithmancy every month, even though I’ve never asked her to. And she knew we weren’t wounded in a duel.” He patted James’ shoulder. “It was a good try though, mate.”

James felt a twinge of guilt somewhere between his shoulders. “If I hadn’t shown up with a black eye, she probably wouldn’t have said anything.”

Remus shrugged, and James realized that his casual attitude was not for show—he genuinely felt comfortable with the idea that Lily knew about his lycanthropy. “Don’t worry about it. She said—well, you heard her, you were there.” He looked to Sirius instead, whose mouth still worked furiously, though silently. “She said that she’d known for a while, but it wasn’t her place to ask. That’s why she gave me the rest of the Dittany—she figured we probably still needed it, or we maybe that we would next month.”

“I can’t believe you’re both so calm about this,” Sirius said with angry disbelief. “How long have we tried to keep this under wraps? Did you tell her, then? About the other three of us?”

“Of course not.” For the first time, Remus lost some of his cool. “This was _my_ issue to tell, and yours is yours. I wouldn’t do that, Padfoot.”

Sirius scoffed, clearly uncomforted. “Your bird needs to wind her neck in, mate,” he said to James. “There’s no reason for her to get involved in _any_ of this. If she tells anyone—”

“She won’t,” James interrupted, and Sirius scoffed again. It had begun to sound like a habit.

“I really don’t think she will,” Remus agreed, and he sounded mild again, his usual self.

“Right. I expect this from Prongs, because he’s always been lovesick, but really, Moony? You too? You don’t think she’ll tell McKinnon? Or Jones? You really think that?” Sirius looked between their faces, and recognized that, yes, they really did. He swore spectacularly, turned on his heel, and left.

Remus grabbed James’ shirt to stop him from following. “Let him go. He’ll come around.”

James sighed and pushed his glasses up to rub his face. “He didn’t have to act like such a tosser,” he said, his voice muffled behind his hand.

“Nah, I think he did. C’mon, we might as well go up to the common room.” James followed Remus as he led them towards the Grand Staircase. “He’s worried, and just doesn’t know how to express it. But has he ever?” He looked sideways at James. “It wasn’t actually even about Lily, you know.”

“I know. But I didn’t like it, all the same.”

“Of cI wouldn’t expect you to.” They climbed the first flight of stairs in silence before Remus spoke again. “I meant what I said, you know. I really don’t think she’ll say anything.”

“Yeah, I don’t either. She’s good at keeping secrets.” James caught the way Remus’ expression changed, and asked one of the questions that had been plaguing him for months. “Did you know? About her and Morton?”

“What about—oh. _Oh._ ” Remus had a way, James thought dully, of making a single syllable speak more volumes than most people’s sentences. “I—well, I suspected, sometime late fifth year. But I didn’t _know_ , no.”

“And you never—”

“Told you? No.” He sighed as James looked at him accusingly. “What was I going to say, Prongs? That I thought something was going on, when I knew you’d go off your head like you did with Greg Greg?” James flinched, but if Remus noticed, he ignored it. “And I had no proof. It was never anything overt, just—these little things, here and there. On top of that, they patrolled together so often, I knew there was no way it wasn’t rigged somehow. But I didn’t know they were—”

“Shagging?” James asked harshly, and now it was Remus’ turn to flinch. He looked truly horrified, James noted with satisfaction, appreciating the company to his misery.

“They—no, Prongs, I didn’t know _that_. Bloody hell, I thought they probably snuck off to snog, because lots of prefects did, but—”

“And you two never did?” The words flew out before James could stop them.

Remus stopped midway through the fourth-floor staircase, each foot on two separate steps. “What, _me_ and Lily?” His disbelief transformed, slowly, to laughter, and he began to chuckle, seemingly against his wishes. “No. Never. C’mon, you _know_ better.”

James couldn’t muster up the energy to feel so much as stupid or annoyed. “As she likes to point out, I don’t really know her.”

“Well, you know _me_.”

There it came—the energy for emotion he thought he couldn’t muster, and the feeling was feeling guilt. “Moony—” he began awkwardly, but Remus waved his hand, dismissing the moment, and began to climb again.

“Don’t worry about it, mate. I get it. She does this to you.”

“I just—she’s so under my skin. I can never read her. I never know what she’s thinking, and she does things that—”

Remus stopped on the fifth floor, and pulled James off the stairs and around the corner, into the relative privacy of the empty fifth-floor corridor, which felt much less exposed than the stairwell. “Do you want to know what I think? As someone who knows her better, and who has a lot more objectivity than you?” he asked, and James gave him a weary _go ahead_ motion. “I think she likes you, Prongs, in a way that I didn’t think possible coming into this year.”

James stared. He opened and closed his mouth several times, not sure, each time, what he meant to say. “Oh,” he finally settled on, but the word sounded empty, devoid of meaning, unlike Remus’ from a moment ago.

“I didn’t even see it before break, but it was there yesterday. She’s nice to you now, and she laughs at your jokes, and, yeah, she nettles you, that’s just her way, that’s how she banters.”

“She acts like that towards you too. And Padfoot.”

Remus gave him a look that rang with pity. “You’re really thick if you believe that. Really. But besides, Padfoot has seen it too. After you went on patrol last night, I asked him about it, and he said that it had been happening since last month at Slughorn’s dinner party, and even more at his Christmas party.”

James waited, tense, worried about what else Sirius might have said—because he knew so much, so much that James knew would make Remus look at him with the same sort of furious disappointment he’d aimed towards Sirius after he’d sent Snape under the Whomping Willow their fifth year. And there were things Sirius didn’t know, still, despite everything that he did—that James had taken Lily to the kitchens, for example, or about their long talk in the prefect’s bathroom after Slughorn’s party, things James had kept close to his chest. He knew Remus wouldn’t look on those later memories as favorably as he did, but would see them as fruit of the poisonous tree, as they had come about only because of James’ unintentional—and then very intentional—spying on Lily with Morton.

But the look from Remus never came, and James smiled as much from relief as from a burgeoning sense of hope at Remus’ words. “It has been different,” he admitted, which was as truthful a representation as he could give of the very good, and very bad, interactions he’d had with her, and Remus beamed in response.

“Knew it. Congratulations, mate. I really didn’t think it could be done.” He led them back out to the staircase, and they resumed their climb. “Just don’t drive her off now. You know how she is—if you try to stick it on her too strongly, she’ll bolt.”

“Yeah, she’s warned me off that more than once. But also, there’s…her and Morton.”

“Wait, really? Still? They’re still…” Remus trailed off, and his mouth twisted in distaste. “I didn’t expect that.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” James muttered, and Remus turned to look at him, his face suddenly sharp.

“Did she tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“That they’re dating?”

“Shagging,” James corrected, and he felt a certain about of vindication at Remus’ look of surprise, which had matched his own when he first heard the news. “Just shagging, she says. And…she kind of told me. It’s complicated.”

Remus looked as if he very much wanted to ask further questions, but finally just shrugged. “Huh. Well, I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“But they’ve been doing this, what, for over a year?”

“So?” They hung back, the Fat Lady now in their sights but far enough away she couldn’t overhear them, just in case she wasn’t asleep as she looked. “If she says that’s all it is, that’s probably all it is. I don’t know why she’d lie, and, besides, she’s dated other blokes, and she’s never hidden it like she has this. Sometimes a shag is just a shag.” He said this as if he knew, and James wondered, for a wild moment, if Remus had sneaked off patrol with a female prefect of his own once or twice. But Remus smiled, patted his shoulder, and started towards the Fat Lady. “C’mon, let’s see if Padfoot is back.”

He wasn’t, but when he reappeared to join them at dinner his mood had entirely changed, and he had turned once again into his usual cheerful self.

After dinner, he challenged Lily to another round of chess, and when she demurred, suggested Exploding Snap. He battled her with such gusto that she threw her arms in triumph when she won their tournament, eking out three victories over his two, and seemed pleased when he acted altogether put out. James knew, when Sirius glanced at him and Remus with a hint of a grin, that his performance was as much an apology to them as it had been to her, even though she had remained oblivious to their quarrel.


	7. Chapter 7

The next day dawned cold and bright, the first after a string of gray, dreary days, and James couldn’t help but think that the weather seemed to celebrate along with him that, after countless, humiliating attempts, he had finally secured a visit to Hogsmeade with Lily.

He knew, of course, that it wasn’t a date, and even if he wanted to pretend it was, Sirius, Remus, and Hestia’s presence made that kind of impossible. The three had waited behind as he and Lily had checked off the names of the students, besides them, who took advantage of the impromptu Hogsmeade visit, only six others in total. James had felt absolutely no sense of surprise when Filch had shown up, despite what McGonagall had said about his plans to enjoy his holiday, and watched them critically the whole time, although he kept any comments he might have had under his breath. Still, even though it wasn’t a date, James appreciated that Lily chose to trail behind Sirius, Remus, and Hestia and walk the long, winding path to the village with him, and enjoyed how she laughed as she guessed at some of the things he and the other Maruaders had pulled on Filch over the years.

“Did you enchant the candles in the Great Hall, that time they went out daily for weeks?”

“Yes.”

“What about the year that Dungbombs kept simultaneously appearing in every suit of armor on the floor of Filch’s office?”

“Of course.”

“And the year all those toilets exploded? What was that, fourth?”

“Yeah. We flushed a lot of Dr. Fillibuster’s fireworks so he wouldn’t catch them on us, but we…kind of forgot they were wet-start. In our defense, we panicked.”

“But he never caught you for any of it!”

Or a million other things, James thought, aware that she might not find many of them—those pranks more personal or more dangerous—quite as funny. Still, he loved the sound of her laughter, and the happy knowledge that a time had never existed, before this year, where she would have found these kinds of stories even a fraction as funny.

Hogsmeade was, indeed, every bit as crowded as McGonagall had promised, and the noise of the crowd began to filter towards them even before they saw the mass of cheerful witches and wizards that perused down the main strip. James stood close enough to Lily that he could hear, even over the clamor, when she sucked in her breath in delight as they rounded the corner and saw the village for the first time.

James had been to Hogsmeade around Christmastime, certainly, as Hogwarts scheduled a visit every year before break, and the shops always looked festive. Yet those memories paled in comparison to the brilliant holiday cheer that seemed to permeate every inch of the village on Christmas Eve. An artificial lake sat to the west side of the strip, covering what James remembered from only days before as a wide, grassy plane, the water frozen over and dotted with ice skaters. Flashing light displays lit up every shop window, each one more ornate and intricate than the last, brilliantly lit even during the day. A large Christmas tree—bigger than any of Hagrid’s, even—sat in the center of the village, all but dripping with enchanted baubles that belted Christmas carols. Snow fell from the sky all throughout the village, starting and stopping right on the dividing line between Hogwarts and Hogsmeade, clearly an enchantment. Although it fell moderately thickly, the snow never seemed to accumulate on the ground past a light dusting, and it felt less cold than usual, too, James reflected, when he stretched his palm out to catch a few flakes. “This is complex,” Lily said as she did the same. “To change the weather over such a large stretch of land—that takes power.”

She and Hestia almost immediately vanished into the crowd, calling behind them something about shopping, and that they’d catch up with them after an hour, maybe. Sirius watched them disappear and shook his head. “This is chaos. You think anyone decorated the Shrieking Shack?”

Although they couldn’t even picture the thought, he, Remus, and James worked their way through the masses, past dozens of cheery shops, until at last both buildings and crowds dwindled away to the desolate road that twisted uphill over a quarter of a mile towards the Shrieking Shack. It looked the same as it had two nights prior, bleak and grey against the blue sky, except some brave soul had conjured a short, lighted Christmas tree, no more than four feet tall, to sit just off the beginning of the drive, a single, small attempt holiday cheer.

After a quick glance around to ascertain that they were, indeed, alone, Sirius knocked the tree over and cast _Bombarda_ to shatter several of the bulbs. “House is haunted, you know,” he said conversationally as he ushered Remus and James away before they could get caught. “Wouldn’t want the locals to forget, would you?”

They wiled the hour away in half a dozen little shops. Remus picked up a beaten-up copy of _Everyday Healing Magic_ in Melvin’s Mysticals, a dingy second-hand store. Sirius loaded his pockets down with Dr. Filibuster’s Wet-Start, No-Heat Fireworks in Zonkos, although he also grabbed a Nose-Biting Teacup almost as an afterthought. (“Haven’t tried it on Filch since second year, remember?” he asked with a grin. “Do you think _he_ remembers?”) James splurged on a pair of Cleansweap’s new chaser’s gloves that promised an improved, no-slip grip, which he had eyed in the most recent issue of _Which Broomstick?_ And, after Sirius and Remus seemed properly engrossed in the trick sweets at Honeydukes, he excused himself to the loo, circled back to Spintwitches Sporting Needs, and bought the beater’s set for Sirius as well.

They had just left the sweet shop, heading towards the Three Broomsticks, when Remus pointed out Lily’s red hair weaving past them in the crowd. Sirius called out to her, and she appeared to have grown accustomed to the sound of her name in his voice, because the expression on her face as she turned towards them—exasperated, but not displeased—seemed to be her usual look when he spoke.

“Buy enough?” Sirius asked once she and Hestia managed to make their way over, each holding several bags on their arms.

“Sod off,” Lily replied, although she sounded quite chipper. “Where are you off to?”

“Three Broomsticks,” James answered, nodding unnecessarily towards the establishment, which sat only a few shops away. Of all the packed buildings at Hogsmeade, the pub looked the most crowded. Even as they watched, a trio of middle-aged wizards approached the doors, looked inside, and then backed away, shaking their heads, apparently unwilling to brave even a step through inside. “You?”

“Honeydukes,” Hestia said, and the customary sweetness on her face didn’t falter as Lily reached out and steadied her when a particularly large family squeezed through nearby and nearly pushed her over. “It’s our last stop. We can join you for a drink after, if you’d like.”

“Actually, why don’t we split up differently? We’re too big a party, and you two bought too much stuff, to fit in either place comfortably, at least until we have a table.” Sirius reached, took Hestia’s shopping bags, and thrust them at James. “Why don’t you and Evans go get a table, and take the bags so Jones can maneuver better and doesn’t get knocked down,” he suggested briskly, his voice all business. “Remus and I will go with Jones to Honeydukes, and we’ll meet you after.”

“Sounds good. I haven’t stocked up on Black Pepper Imps yet,” Remus agreed immediately, even though James knew he had at least a dozen shoved in the pockets of his cloak.

Hestia had the decency to look at Lily for her okay, although it no longer seemed to matter as Sirius casually draped an arm around her shoulders to steer her away. “Pick me up coconut ice!” Lily called after her retreating back, and Sirius held a thumbs up over his head before they disappeared. “They’re about as subtle as you,” she told James as they started towards the Three Broomsticks.

“They are my friends, after all. But that was honestly pretty smooth, at least for them.”

Lily left him the minute they got through the doors, offering some airy remark about finding a table, which left James to fight his way to the bar, attract the attention of the frantically busy barkeep, order two Butterbeers, and try to find her without sloshing the steaming beverages down his front. He saw her, eventually, tucked along the wall just behind the bar, a table away from the windows, with her shopping bags spread out around her to claim the six-top table for them.

“Nearly got in a shoving match with this bloke when I ordered,” he said when he reached her, and he offered her a mug, which she took to hold in her cold hands gratefully.

“I saw. What was worse—that he nearly knocked you over, or that he wore a Haileybury Hammers jersey? You hate them, don’t you?”

“Yes, because everyone likes them, even people who aren’t from Ontario! Do you know how many times they’ve won the World Cup in the last twenty years? Everyone who supports them are all just fair-weather fans because they win!” Her laughter sounded like music to his ears.

James had worried, in the more than adequate time he’d had to stew while he waited for drinks, that perhaps things would grow awkward between them once they were alone, the setting too date-like for the survival of any of the apparently friendly ease that had grown between them over the past few weeks. Those fears vanished entirely the moment he asked her about her own favorite Quidditch team, and she launched into a more passionate explanation about the Holyhead Harpies than he expected.

“Why?” she asked when he noted his surprise at her interest, smiling against the rim of her mug. “Did you just assume I cared too much about school to ever think about Quidditch? You should know by now that you don’t know me.”

But he felt like he was starting to, more and more, and that hadn’t changed how much he liked her. If anything, he liked her more.

She asked him about his family, and seemed genuinely shocked when he explained that his dad had invented Sleekeazy’s Hair Potion. She said it made much sense, however, when he explained that his parents had given up on having children before he was born. That would explain, she reckoned, for “part of his massive ego” and “why they’d be willing to adopt Black too.” He could hardly argue either point, and she seemed surprised that he had no retort, but she hid it quickly.

She told him about her family, about her doctor father (“a sort of muggle Healer,” she explained quickly when he clearly didn’t understand) and her homemaker mother (he understood that well enough), and he had a thousand questions about how they’d reacted when she’d received her Hogwarts letter. After getting over their shock they had been as pleased as punch, from her description, although her sister had not. And her voice changed, getting not quite sad, but markedly different from the way she spoke about her parents.

“She’s getting married next summer,” she told him, twisting her mug, “And the night before I left for school this year, she said that she didn’t want me there, because she didn’t want to have to introduce me to her fiancé’s family. Our parents wanted to insist, but…well, what’s the point? What good would it do? So I decided to stay here for Christmas this year, just to avoid a big row. We have one every year, and I’m sick of our parents feeling like they have to pick sides.”

He resisted the urge to lean across the table to take her hand. “Sirius has this thing he says about his family, and it seems like it applies to your sister. He’ll say, ‘Sometimes the trash has a way of taking itself out.’” She laughed, almost despite herself, and the melancholy lifted off her shoulders just a little.

After hearing about her family, he wanted more than ever to ask her about Snape, about what had passed between them as children that had made her defend him so staunchly and stand by him for so long, but he didn’t.

Instead, he asked her about Hestia and her mother, and Lily’s mouth set a firm, grim line, immediately angry. “Death Eaters,” she explained tersely. “Last spring, right before Easter. They blew the house to bits and left the Dark Mark and everything.”

“Why didn’t I know?”

“What, like the _Prophet_ was going to report on it?” she scoffed. “Well, they have an excuse this time, at least—they didn’t get a chance. The Ministry hushed it all up. Her mum worked in the Department of Mysteries, apparently really deep in—Hestia didn’t even know what she did there. Marlene’s mum tried to take a vested interest in her death—she’s an Auror, remember—and higher-ups basically told her to basically stop digging, because the Ministry didn’t want any questions into the kind of work Hestia’s mum did. I guess, in their minds, they knew You-Know-Who had ordered it, and the chances of catching the specific culprit were slim, so it wasn’t worth compromising whatever work she had done for them over the years.”

“That doesn’t make it any better for Jones,” he said furiously, and she smiled a bit, if sadly, at his tone.

“No. It really doesn’t. But I don’t think the Ministry cares about that. They’d rather keep it quiet, and Hestia has too. Only Marlene and I know, I think.” And now him too, she left unsaid, and she didn’t ask him to keep the information to himself, as though she already knew that he would. That, more than anything, impressed upon him that things really had changed between them. Only two months before, she had demanded proof of his absolute ability to keep quiet about seeing her with Morton by humiliating him into admissions that still, when he thought about it, made his stomach hurt. Now, she had confided in him something much more serious, much darker, and hadn’t seemed to spare trusting him with the secret a second thought. Did she trust him, maybe, because he had proven himself with her secret about Morton?

For the first time in his life, James felt a real, genuine flash of appreciation for the boke, maybe the first one he’d ever had—and certainly the first one all year.

“I wanted to kiss you, you know,” he told her abruptly, emboldened by her trust. “In the prefect’s bathroom, after Slughorn’s party.”

She nearly choked on the last of her Butterbeer. “Where did _that_ come from?” she asked, and he didn’t even mind that she had gone into a fit of laughter, because it brushed the lingering melancholy and anger from her face.

He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. But I wanted to and didn’t. I started kicking myself the second you left, and I haven’t stopped.”

“I know you wanted to. I could tell.” She sounded fond, as if recalling a cherished memory. “It read all over your face—remember, you’re not subtle. I mean, you always kind of look at me in this…this way, and it was even more—”

“In what way?”

She shifted and reached up to brush back an errant wave of hair, as if the need for clarification made her uncomfortable. “There’s a way,” she said simply, deflecting, and then pushed on before he could press her further. “Anyway, I was pretty sure all evening that you were going to try at some point, and I was absolutely certain you were going to in that moment.” She didn’t need to clarify what moment she meant. They both knew, he could tell just from looking at her her face, knew that she meant when he had slung the bathrobe around her shoulders. “Why didn’t you?”

She sounded, he thought, about as casual as if she were inquiring about the weather.

“I had reasons.”

“Go ahead.”

“Are you enjoying this?” he asked, even though he knew the answer by the way that she leaned in on her elbows, her chin cupped in her hand, and her eyes glittered in that teasing, dangerous way he’d come to expect—and love—and fear—all at once. When she didn’t answer, clearly waiting, he sighed and held up three fingers, in a move entirely the same as the one he’d pulled on his friends only a few nights before. He lowered one. “If I kissed you, and you let me, I didn’t want it to be because you were mad at Morton.”

She leaned back, pulling a face. “Potter, I’m not like that.”

“You’re the one who keeps telling me that I don’t know you, so how was I to know?”

She chewed on that for a second, and although she clearly still didn’t like it, conceded, “Fine. Fair. But I’m telling you now, so you _do_ know this about me—I’m not like that. Second?”

He ticked off another finger. “You had been drinking, so if I kissed you and you let me, I wasn’t sure you wouldn’t hate me in the morning.”

“That’s fairer, I think. But I wasn’t sloshed. You kept treating me like I was.”

“I know that. But you also weren’t you, and I didn’t want to feel like…like I was kissing someone else.” Looking at her had suddenly become rather hard. He lowered his third finger and reached for his Honeydukes bag, not for any specific thing, but more for the distraction of something to do with his eyes and his hands. “Third, I wasn’t sure that you’d let me.”

She stayed silent long enough that he finally had to look up from his rummaging, and found her watching him quite impassively, picking absently at her nails. “I felt so humiliated when I left,” she said finally, although she sounded more detached than embarrassed, and he could only stare.

_“You_ did? Why?”

“Because I wanted you to kiss me, and I knew you knew that, and you still didn’t.”

_“Oh.”_ And James sounded like Remus, then, at least to his own ears, as if he could only express the weight of the world that had come upon his shoulders in a single syllable.

The gears in his brain seemed to have suddenly clogged, clogged on something so large and immovable that he wondered if his mind would ever work right thereafter. He felt like his lungs might never remember to breathe again, like his tongue had forgotten how to shape words, like his eyes could no longer focus.

“Don’t you _dare_ get smug about this,” she said sharply, jolting him back to reality, and he only realized then that he’d started grinning.

“I’m sorry.” He tried to wipe the look off his face, but his grin bounced back unbidden. “But I really wasn’t sure, so it’s all just hitting me now. You _wanted_ me to?”

“Yes.”

“So, I should have kissed you.” He tried not to make it sound like a question, even though he still felt no confidence in the words as a statement.

She shrugged. “Probably.”

“And…if I tried again?”

She smiled at that, and he felt certain he knew why—because suddenly the ball seemed firmly back in her court, the power once again hers. “I mean, it would entirely depend,” she said, and he found it bothered him hardly at all, in that moment, that she played these games with coy words and sly looks, because he could almost see himself getting closer to where he wanted to be with her.

“On what?”

“Really, so many things. What’s the phase of the moon? What’s the location of Saturn? What’s—”

“You’re literally just asking Divination questions.”

“Really? I never took it, but—”

The room exploded.

James hit the polished wooden floor hard, and the entire weight of his body landed squarely on his left forearm. He felt something give, and pain shot up through his arm and into every inch of his body, accompanied by a bright light he could see even though closed eyes. In the moment, he associated the light with his pain, certain he had gotten hurt badly enough that he saw spots, but he would later come to understand, though the recollections of others, that the light actually came from several spells ricocheting around the pub at once.

When he opened his eyes, he found the air around him so thick with smoke that he could hardly see a foot in front of his face, and even that vision needed to filter through the cracked lenses of his glasses, which hardly helped his plight. He rolled to his side to reach into his pocket for his wand, and heard an uncontrollable scream rip from his throat, a noise he didn’t recognize as his own, as his left arm dangled uselessly with such a pain that he felt, again, rather faint. He only realized once his own cry died out that he hadn’t just heard his own voice in the air; no, his scream had joined a choir of others, many of those still ongoing, some piercing shrieks, others deep sobs, and more still the shouting of words he couldn’t understand, of spells and names and orders.

He felt a cool hand on his cheek, and Lily’s face swam before him, disfigured by a deep gash on her forehead that poured blood down her face, obscuring her pretty features. “It’s okay, I’m okay, you’re okay,” she whispered fervently, soothingly, her breath warm against his face.

He realized, rather dimly, that the bar behind her, which had collapsed in on itself like a bonfire, had erupted in flames.

She moved her body closer to his, crawling stealthily upon her elbows to keep her stomach flush to the floor. “Oh, your arm—I can’t fix it, not quickly, not with the bone through the skin—”

The words registered in the deep recess of his mind, and his stomach roiled in nauseated protest. “You’re bleeding,” he told her hoarsely, and she brushed at the wound on her head carelessly. Her hand came away thick with blood.

“I’m fine.” Screams intensified, just outside their line of sight, although James thought he could see the beginnings of shadows through the thick smoke. “Listen,” she hissed urgently. “Don’t make a sound. Do you hear me? And stay still.” She tapped her wand against the top of his head, and James felt the cold, familiar spread of a Disillusionment Charm slide down his body. She cast it on herself next, and he watched as she disappeared, chameleon-like, into the floorboards.

Hit with a cold blue spell, a table not five yards away burst apart, splintering into a thousand pieces, and James saw the culprit emerge from an envelope of shadowy smoke that continued to steadily dissipate. “Louisa Mullins!” He spoke with the voice of man, but nothing else about him revealed any clue to his identity. He dressed all in black, with the hood pulled up on his thick cloak, and he sported gloves on his hands. A full white mask entirely covered his face, with slits only for his eyes and mouth.

James knew immediately, without question, that the man was a Death Eater.

“Louisa Mullins!” he shouted again. As he approached a clustered heap of customers scattered around a broken booth, James saw that the entire front and roof of the Three Broomsticks had been blown away into a pile of burning rubble and shattered glass. “Where is she?” he demanded of a witch who cradled a broken wrist.

“I don’t know!” she sobbed, and as James watched, the Death Eater cast something at her, a spell so dark it looked almost black, that split her injured arm open from shoulder to wrist. As blood poured from the mangled wound, she began to immediately, uncontrollably scream.

James realized, almost detached, that had never heard a noise like it before.

He felt Lily’s hand, still invisible, come to grip the shoulder of his good arm, so tight that it almost hurt more than it comforted.

A tall woman, perhaps in her late-forties with bobbed gray hair, stood up from behind a toppled table. She wore a Three Broomsticks apron, and James recognized her as one of the owners of the pub, and the mother of Rosmerta Mullins, who had graduated a handful of years above them. “Please stop,” she begged, and held up her arms, her wand clutched between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, completely useless as she turned her palms towards the Death Eater in surrender. “Please, just do—”

She didn’t get to finish. The Death Eater gave a sharp flick of his wand in the same manner one might shoo off a fly. James didn’t hear the incantation over the screams of the other pub-dwellers, but he recognized the blinding, emerald green light as the Killing Curse even before Louisa Mullins dropped, dead before she hit the floor.

Several people continued to scream long past the others, and James located one such person, the same man in the Haileybury Hammers jersey who had jostled him at the bar, now sprawled several feet away on his back. It took James’ brain several long, painful moments to comprehend that the man now missed a leg, and that thick, heavy blood, almost black, poured from the stump. Splinched, he realized a second later, and badly, as if something had interrupted his Disapparation.

“They’ve _all_ splinched,” he heard Lily breathe, and he realized that the Haileybury Hammers man wasn’t the only one screaming from a sudden lack of body parts. Although he knew no one could hear her over the pandemonium of the room, the roar of the increasing fire at the bar, and a howling from outside that he hadn’t yet placed, he wanted to clap a hand over her mouth to silence her, and might have, if he had had the range of motion and the ability to see her.

A bespectacled, middle-aged man, also in a Three Broomsticks apron, crawled to clutch Louisa Mullins’s body, to hold her the best he could with one shoulder severely dislocated, swinging uselessly out of its socket. Although the Death Eater’s mask obscured his face, James thought he could hear the sneer in his voice as he shouted something at the man, although James could only make out the words “blood traitor” over the continued screams. The Death Eater jabbed his wand sharply, and although no light came out, the man began to convulse uncontrollably on the ground. His screams, somehow, were worse than all the others’ put together, even worse than the woman who still sobbed over the remnants of her ruined arm. His screams made the pain sound deeper, more primal, than anything James hoped to experience, and although he had never seen it performed, had only read the theory in books, he knew he watched the Cruciatus Curse in action.

“I could hit him,” Lily whispered suddenly against his ear, and he felt her body shift closer to his, as if she aimed her wand across him towards the scene. “I could stun him.”

_“Don’t!”_ He wasn’t sure at first why he said it, his brain so clouded with pain and horror and increasing nausea that it took a moment for his thoughts to catch up with his feelings. His words came out rushed, then, desperate. “Don’t you fucking dare, Evans—there are more of them, there have to be—if you stun him and they come in, they’ll tear this place apart, they’ll—”

“But if everyone else—”

Almost as if on cue, an additional pair of Death Eaters entered the wreckage of the pub, one almost jogging, and the other fairly sauntering behind. “Cleared?” the jogger asked, shouting to be heard over the bespectacled man’s screams, and James realized, with a jolt, that the tall, slender figure underneath the black cloak was a woman.

The first Death Eater didn’t bother to break his Cruciatus Curse, which he now seemed to perform rather lazily, moving his wand as an experienced conductor might conduct an andante piece of music. He nodded.

And then, for lack of a better term, the three Death Eaters began to play.

James didn’t know how else to describe it in the moment, and would later struggle for the right word in recollections to friends and authorities alike. But something about the Death Eaters’ dispositions as they turned their attentions upon the other inhabitants of the pub reminded James forcefully of the way that a child might take his parent’s wand and use it to destroy one ant at a time that marched out of an anthill. The Death Eaters’ actions lacked any regard for the feelings of those around them, victims or spectators, as though they considered the inhabitants of the Three Broomsticks lower life forms—which, James realized later, bitterly, they almost certainly did.

He wasn’t sure how long he lay motionless on the floor, trying not to watch, yet unable to look away. Time seemed to have lost all meaning. He would later recall the events that transpired—certainly, he wouldn’t be able to get them off his mind in the coming days and weeks and months, or truly ever—but not how long they lasted. Time seemed to pass in moments, not minutes, each one more horrible than the last.

He watched as one of the Death Eaters turned upon a woman and her child. They conjured ropes to bind the mother, and then levitated her child—a girl, no more than four or five, by James’ eye—flipping her upside down in the air, and began to spin her like a top, faster and faster. Every time the mother would scream, a second Death Eater would cast a spell at her, something dark and wicked that made blood blossom underneath the mother’s robes. Cutting spells, James realized, as a long, thin slash appeared upon her cheek. Eventually, the mother fell silent, even as sobs still wracked her body, and the little girl’s screams—shriller than all the rest—cut off abruptly as well, as her head sagged loosely from side to side.

The Death Eaters chose people, seemingly by random, to blast with the same _Bombarda_ Sirius had cast on the Christmas tree baubles outside the Shrieking Shack what felt like a lifetime ago. (And as James realized this, his thoughts previously somehow disconnected from his emotions, suddenly all of the feeling—worry, horror, fear—rushed back to him, as he wondered—where were his friends? Where had Sirius, Remus, and Hestia ended up? _Were they okay?)_ With each cast, a victim would fly spectacularly through the air, and land painfully yards away with shattered bones and broken skin. Most stayed conscious, somehow, but when one elderly man hit the wood floor particularly hard, his head fairly bounced on impact, and he didn’t move again. Blood began to pool steadily beneath him, streaming from his ears.

They cast all manner of dark spells that James had never even heard of. They cast a curse that stretched the victim’s limbs, pulling them out tighter and tighter, as if on a medieval rack, before they finally gave way, ripping out of joint. They cast a curse that twisted limbs at unnatural angles, back or forward farther than they should go, or rotated, turned like a screw. They cast a curse that set skin alight with an unnatural, blue flame, which seemed to grow, inexplicably, the more a person thrashed.

And the whole while, they laughed.

At some point, James realized, dully, he had begun to cry.

And then, suddenly, it was over.

As if by some unspoken signal, all three Death Eaters Disapparated with a trio of loud cracks. In the next moment, more of the same cracks rang out, and Ministry wizards poured into the wreckage of the building from the street, their wands raised.

James turned in time to see Lily rematerialize beside him, and then felt the hot sensation of the Disillusionment Charm lifting from himself as well. “Are you okay?” he asked immediately, even though he could very well see that she wasn’t. Her head wound still wept blood, although at a slower rate, it seemed, and tear tracks mingled with some of the blood staining her cheeks. He couldn’t remember ever seeing her cry before.

“I’m fine,” she told him swiftly, just as she had after the initial explosion. She hovered over him, and reached a tentative hand to touch just above his left ear, which immediately sent stars flashing before his eyes. “Sorry,” she said hastily, and then her hands moved quickly, so fast that James, in his current state, could hardly keep up with her.

She ran her wand across his head, to pass over the wound she had just detected, and he felt some of the pain lessen just slightly, although not disappear completely. She cast _Ferula_ on his injured arm, which became immediately bound in bandages, and the sheer, hot pain seemed to better slightly. “It won’t fix it,” she said, “But it’ll hold.” She moved quickly to his nose, and cast _Episkey_ , which left his face feeling very hot, and then very cold. He hadn’t even noticed his nose had broken.

“Stay here, and don’t you dare fall asleep. _Stay awake_.” She struggled to her feet. With the sudden perfect view of her ankles, he realized that blood had soaked through the right calf of her jeans, and completely drenched her shoe. “Don’t you fucking dare,” she snapped at him, echoing his previous command to her, as he tried to sit up. “Don’t make me put you in the Full-Body Bind. _I will_.” And then she rushed off, favoring her left leg and hardly held back by her limp.

James watched as she cleared the space to the man in the Haileybury Hammers jersey. He had stopped screaming at some point, and moving as well. She set about to stopping the blood flow on his mangled leg, although she did have to twist her body around, at one point, in order to vomit.

And then he heard her start yelling, and he began to try to sit up again before he realized what she shouted. “Frank! Frank!”

The last thing James remembered was Frank Longbottom’s face suspended over his, although he looked entirely unlike the Frank that James knew. This man shared Frank’s features, but his face was set, rather grey, and his mouth firm, with none of the grinning laughter that James so staunchly associated with his friend. He looked far older than twenty. “Close your eyes, James,” he instructed, and he had Frank’s voice. And then he cast something that made James’ world go black.


End file.
